Why did astronauts have to leave space station when there is a weightless situation?
They did not actually leave, the astronauts closed all the hatches in the station and moved to the Soyuz escape module to wait it out. After the debris passed safely, they emerged, opened up all the hatches, and got back to work. It was a piece of a used booster called a Payload Assist Module, a device used to boost satellites from low Earth orbit up to geosynchronous orbit. Robert Pearlman from CollectSpace told me: This object is the “yo weight” from a Delta PAM-D stage (used to launch GPS 37 in 1993). The yo weight is a small mass attached to a 1-meter-long cable, used to tumble the stage after separation from the payload so it doesn’t recontact. The mass is probably less than 1 kg, but because it’s basically a piece of string, the cross-section is large for its mass. A 1 kg mass moving at a relative speed of several kilometers per second could have done vast damage to the ISS, especially since it was not compact like a chunk of metal, but extended. It could have torn a huge hole in
