Astronauts Forced To Take Refuge As Dangerous Space Debris Flies Past ISS

Russian and American crew members aboard the International Space Station (ISS) were forced to take refuge on Monday morning when space debris flew past the football-field-sized modular space station twice, according to the Russian state-owned TASS news agency.

U.S. astronaut Mark Vande Hei and Russian cosmonauts Anton Shkaplerov and Peter Dubrov were ordered to move to the Soyuz MS-19 spacecraft, while American astronauts Raja Chari, Thomas Marshburn and Kayla Barron, as well as Germany's Matthias Maurer, relocated to the Crew Dragon after a piece of space debris was projected to fly past the ISS.

Space junk was expected to fly past the ISS at 10:06 a.m. Moscow time, and again from 11:38 to 11:44 a.m. Moscow time on Monday morning, TASS reported, citing Russian space agency Roscosmos.

"According to the [NASA] Mission Control Center in Houston, the station will soon enter a corridor potentially approaching a space debris object,'' Roscosmos said.

Crew members were allowed to return to the ISS following the first projected incident, but were moved again shortly after.

"The Soyuz crew is in the ship, the hatches are covered, we are ready," Russian cosmonaut Dubrov said, via a livestream on NASA's website.

An official at NASA's Mission Control Center in Houston in an update said that the space debris fragments "have passed." Dubrov noted that crew members did not notice "any signs" of collision with space debris.

The Russian space agency said that in the event of a "potentially dangerous object" approaching the ISS, crew members must move to take refuge at docked ships.

All crew members have since been allowed to return to the ISS.

In total, there have been some 30 incidents involving space junk that have required the ISS to take evasive action, three of which occurred last year. The ISS, the largest inhabited space station, has been in orbit for 23 years.

Last week, a fragment of the Fengyun-1C weather satellite, which was destroyed by a Chinese anti-satellite missile test in 2007, had a near-miss with the ISS. The incident forced the station to make an urgent change of orbit.

"In order to dodge the 'space junk', (mission control) specialists ... have calculated how to correct the orbit of the International Space Station," Roscosmos said.

It isn't yet clear what space debris flew past the ISS twice on Monday.