NASA calls off spacewalk due to possible risk from space debris

A planned spacewalk outside the International Space Station by astronauts Tom Marshburn and Kayla Barron was called off early Tuesday after NASA received an overnight warning about possibly threatening space debris.

The station's seven-member crew was not told to take shelter in their Earth-return spacecraft and no other actions were required. But the spacewalk was delayed, NASA said in a blog post, "due to the lack of opportunity to properly assess the risk [the debris] could pose to the astronauts."

The post did not say where the "debris notification" came from or whether the debris in question originated from a November 14 anti-satellite weapon test by Russia that created a cloud of some 1,700 trackable fragments, and an unknown number of smaller pieces. The test was blasted by the U.S. as "reckless," and NASA ordered the ISS crew to take shelter in their Crew Dragon and Soyuz spacecraft as a precaution soon after the satellite was destroyed.