Shuttle Dodges Chunk of Space Debris

The space shuttle Discovery early Monday dodged a chunk of a Soviet rocket in the first such near-collision of the program.

The shuttle and the debris--about the size of a van--passed within about 10 miles of each other a few minutes after midnight. If Discovery had not changed its orbit, it would have come within about 1.4 miles of the rocket, NASA spokesman James Hartsfield said Monday.

National Aeronautics and Space Administration rules stipulate that the shuttle fly no closer than 1.6 miles above or beside another orbiting object, or four miles behind another object.

The astronauts tried to spot the object, but it passed too quickly. They were traveling at 17,500 m.p.h., and the debris was moving at 16,364 m.p.h.

NASA flight director Al Pennington said he was notified of the impending encounter about five hours before it was to occur. The astronauts lowered their orbit by a mile with more than two hours to spare, he said. The crew also assembled a giant “erector set” as practice for work on the proposed space station.

Also on Monday, controllers at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., succeeded in activating a data receiver that had failed on a large, shuttle-launched satellite that will monitor the atmosphere’s ozone layer.