Nobody knows from what satellite or spacecraft this exactly came from, but the RAF's Defence Flying Complaints Investigation Team says that it definitely came from space. They say that its heavy mass indicates that it has been up in a decaying orbit for a decade or more.

Great. As if we didn't have enough with all that space junk risking the life of astronauts up there. [Daily Mail]

We have a bit of a mystery on the foam loss. It's from an area that we typically don't expect foam to be lost. We're not worried about this one [Endeavour], but we need to understand what's going on for the next flight. This is new. I don't know if we have a material issue or a process issue but we'll get to the bottom of it and clear it before the August flight.

According to Shannon, the thin foam in the section between the hydrogen and oxygen tanks is not subject to intense cold. They never thought it could peel like that.

Bottom line: Astronauts are ok, and there goes my trip to the Kennedy Space Center this August. [Reuters]

After discovering that the remains of a Russian satellite could pose a serious security risk, NASA is now considering the possibility of changing the course of the International Space Station and Discovery. They have already notified the crews, but nothing has been decided yet. The Discovery mission commander Mike Fincke got the news, to which he replied with classic astronaut aplomb: "You know where to fin us." These guys have the right stuff indeed.

This is the second debris collision scare in a few days. The first one required the ISS crew to step into the Soyuz escape capsule in preparation for a potential accident that, at the end, never happened. [Red Orbit]

The collision has sent more than 600 pieces of debris whizzing around the Earth at 17,500 mph. At those speeds, shards can take out a spacecraft (and you don't even want to think about what it could do to astronauts on a spacewalk). NASA has calculated the chance of a catastrophic impact at around 1 in 185—just below their 1 in 200 threshold. A decision on whether or not to progress with the Hubble repair mission in May is expected to come down within the next week or two. [Discovery via Wired]

About 50 percent of all trackable objects are due to in-orbit explosion events (about 200) or collision events (less than 10).

Yes, we knew that there was a lot of crap out there, but not to this extent. According to the ESA, this is really bad news and urgent measures are needed. Explosions in space are not disastrous on their own, but because of the aftermath. One example: a geostationary satellite travels at 6,213 miles per hour. If it explodes, all the debris stays near the orbit, forming a cloud around the Earth within a few days, as this simulation shows:

The ESA is urging to introduce measures to mitigate this problem, like the complete depletion of fuel in rocket stages (like some Delta launchers already do following NASA's Procedural Requirements for Limiting Orbital Debris) or returning objects to Earth once their mission is complete (perhaps to destroy them on re-entry,) just like SES Americom is going to do with their brand-new AMC-14. This satellite failed to reach its projected altitude and now has to be splashed into the sea because of a dispute with Boeing, which won't let SES Americom use their patented recovery method to put the satellite into the right geostationary orbit.

The impact of these measures could be huge, as reflected by this simulation of how things could look by the year 2112, with and without taking action:

While the idea of bringing back used stages and satellites back to Earth may seem too expensive, in the long run it's clear that leaving all this trash up there is going to have huge consequences to the development of space exploration and colonization. Those concepts may still seem science fiction for many, but as these simulations show, the current and future problem is very real, and could be extremely dangerous.

This is how it looks when orbital debris hits a spaceship, simulated in a laboratory.

[ESA Gallery, Space debris: assessing the risk, NASA, Wikipedia — via Space Travel and Slashdot]