Space Junk!

Yep, floating around our blue planet is a plethora of man-made pollution. As you recall, we had breaking news yesterday regarding the evacuation of the international space station.

The international space station's three crew members climbed into their Soyuz lifeboat as a "precautionary measure" while a piece of space junk passed by today, NASA said. The space agency said the debris from a spent satellite rocket motor zipped past, apparently without causing damage, and the crew was given the all-clear to return to the station and resume normal operations.

Space agency spokesmen said yesterday afternoon that the debris was about 5 inches (12.7 centimeters) in size, which would be larger than the initial estimates of 0.35 inches (9 millimeters). The space junk, said to be from a PAM-D, or payload assist motor, was projected to pass about 4.5 kilometers (2.8 miles) from the station at 12:39 p.m. ET, Jeffs said.

My question is why do we know that a 5 inch piece of metal is approaching the space station when we did not know or were not told of the 2 mile long asteroid that brushed close by the earth?

If you remember the ole science fiction movie, Asteroid, you will recall that we humans had plenty of time to prepare for our approaching doom. Technology finally saved the day when the asteroid was destroyed. Guess it may be not really important to know if we are going to hammered by an asteroid with the force of 1000 Hiroshima type bombs!