Japan warns ships to avoid floating houses, debris

Floating debris from last month's tsunami is so enormous it is clogging shipping lanes off Japan, prompting Japan's coast guard to warn ships to give the area an especially wide berth, Bloomberg Businessweek reports.

The coast guard, which is posting daily reports on the the debris on the Internet, is warning ships to stay about 45 miles farther from the area of a stricken nuclear plant than is required for safety from radiation.

"Our forces have seen everything from cars to tractor-trailers to entire, intact homes floating in the ocean," say Anthony J. Falvo, a spokesman for the U.S. 7th Fleet, which is helping with recovery efforts, Bloomberg Businessweek reports. "They have never seen anything like it."

Ships are particularly worried that major debris will damage propellers.

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NASA now says satellite debris no threat to space station

NASA has given the all-clear to the three crewmembers of the International Space Station after tracking data indicated a small piece of Chinese space junk poses no threat to them.

This morning around 7, flight controllers notified commander Dmitry Kondratyev and flight engineers Cady Coleman and Paolo Nespoli that they needed to prepare to evacuate to their Soyuz TMA-20 capsule if the debris continued on its course, which would bring it to within 2.7 miles of the station. The closest approach was predicted for 4:21 p.m. ET. The all-clear was given at 2:41 p.m. ET.

The debris came from a defunct Chinese weather satellite deliberately destroyed in 2007 during an anti-satellite weapons test.

It's the second junk scare in several days. Friday, flight controllers moved the space station out of the way of another piece of satellite debris. More than 500,000 pieces of orbiting trash are tracked from Earth.

Today's nervousness came as NASA astronaut Ron Garan and Russian cosmonauts Andrey Borisenko and Alexander Samokutyaev continued their journey to the space station. They lifted off before dawn today in Kazakhstan and will dock Wednesday at 7:18 p.m. ET.

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