International Space Station manoeuvres to avoid 'Chinese junk'

The International Space Station manoeuvred itself on Wednesday to avoid a piece of debris spawned by a Chinese antisatellite weapon test in 2007.

The piece of junk was projected to enter what's called the "pizza box," a square-shaped zone 2.5 miles deep and 30 miles wide, where the station sits in the middle. NASA officials keep close eyes on the zone using data models on the location of objects in space kept by the US Space Command, The New York Times reported.

This move came three hours before NASA's Crew-3 mission launched to orbit.

The US space agency worked with the Russian space agency to fire station to get rid of the threat.

"It just makes sense to go ahead and do this burn and put this behind us so we can ensure the safety of the crew," Joel Montalbano, NASA's space station manager, told reporters during a news conference.

The debris is a remnant of China's Fengyun-1C, a weather satellite that launched in 1999 and was decommissioned in 2002 but remained in orbit, The New York Times reported.

Months ago, fragments of China's Long March 5B-rocket, which was launched with the first module for the country's orbital station in April had also entered the Earth's atmosphere over the Indian Ocean, the China Manned Space Engineering Office (CMSEO) said.

This uncontrolled re-entry of a China Long March rocket into Earth's atmosphere had also spurred the calls for new policies to help mitigate the growing problem of space junk.

( With inputs from ANI )