ISS Nearly Clobbered By Space Debris 131
erice writes "A chuck of space debris came within 335 meters of the space station, forcing the crews to head to their escape capsules and prepare for emergency evacuation to Earth. '[NASA's] Associate Administrator for Space Operations, Bill Gerstenmaier, said it was the closest a debris object had ever come to the station. An analysis was now underway to try to understand its origin, he added.'"
Re:I get that space is big and all... (Score:5, Informative)
In the vastness of our skies, two airplanes coming within a mile of each other is close. Now imagine being ~170mi above the Earth.
On the Discovery Channel, they showed a picture of what a 1/2 inch flake of paint can do at those speeds. It left a 3 inch crater about 1/4 deep in the aluminum wing of the Shuttle.
Wiki has a nice pic of what a 7gram object can do: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:SDIO_KEW_Lexan_projectile.jpg [wikipedia.org]