It's wake up call for NASA and other space agencies of the world! Three astronauts of the International Space Station took refuge in the Russian Soyuz capsule attached to the station to protect themselves from small but lethal piece of space junk, enough to puncture a hole in the station, which zoomed past dangerously close to the Space Station on Thursday.

The three astronauts, Americans Mike Fincke and Sandra Magnus and Russian Yury Lonchakov, stayed in the Russian spaceship - Soyuz, for 11 minutes. The Russian escape capsule Soyuz could have taken the three astronauts to Earth if needed.

According to Gene Stansbery, orbital debris program manager at NASA's Johnson Space Center, the leathal piece of space derbis was 5-inch long that was traveling at a speed of 5 miles per second (22,000 mph) relative to the orbiting lab. The piece of space junk was more than 10 times bigger than the smallest object that can puncture the station's shielding. It was part of a U. S. rocket that launched in 1993.

Stansbery told that if the piece of space derbis had struck the station, it would have made a hole in the station, and a hole in the station could cause leaking of oxygen that could be serious problem for astronauts. Orbiting 220 miles above the Earth, the space station is flying beneath most of the debris.

Communicating with the crew, the astronaut Clay Anderson in Mission Control said, "Mr. Dempsey was sweating bullets," referring to station flight director Robert Dempsey.

Fincke replied, "We were ready in case of a worst-case scenario, but thank goodness it didn't happen." NASA's Robert Dempsey, the flight director in charge of Mission Control, said, "We knew the probability of a strike was fairly low, but the impact would have been pretty severe."

The Thursday's incident at the space station has brought to light the growing threat posed by derbis that got collected in the space over the 50 years of the Space Age. The American military has already found more than
18,000 objects moving in space - some no larger than a baseball.