By: Jason Yang

On Wednesday afternoon, astronauts abord the International Space Station had to take shelter because an old Russian satellite had broken up into pieces. Not long after the incident, the astronauts were able to leave the spacecraft and carry on with the work they did normally.

The US Space Command has been tracking the broken pieces, and by Thursday afternoon, about 180 pieces were already found. Events like this don’t usually happen, but there are concerns that this may also happen to another spacecraft, affecting the spacecrafts that are actually working.

The spacecraft broke up at about 220 miles above earth, which is an area where thousands of satellites ranging in size operate from. LeoLabs, a US space-tracking company, said about the satellite that “Due to the low orbit of this debris cloud, we estimate it’ll be weeks to months before the hazard has passed.”

There are about twenty-five thousand pieces of space junk that are larger than four inches, which causes concerns that it could cause more problems in the future because they can hit other spacecraft.

The satellite was already dead, so it wouldn’t have any effect back on Earth. Dead satellites remain in orbit until they fall back into the atmosphere of the earth and gets burned up in the process. In some pretty rare cases, the satellites fly away into deep space and pose way less of a threat to working satellites.