A spacewalk planned for Tuesday to repair a faulty antenna on the International Space Station was postponed indefinitely, Nasa said, citing a “debris notification” it received for the orbiting research laboratory.

Two US astronauts had been scheduled to venture outside the space station at 1210 GMT to begin their work, facing what Nasa officials had called an elevated risk posed by debris from a Russian anti-satellite missile test.

But about five hours before the outing was to have commenced, Nasa said on Twitter that the spacewalk had been called off for the time being. “Nasa received a debris notification for the space station. Due to the lack of opportunity to properly assess the risk it could pose to the astronauts, teams have decided to delay the November 30 spacewalk until more information is available,” the space agency tweeted.

It was not made clear how close debris had come to the space station, orbiting about 402km above the Earth, or whether it was related to the Russian missile test. Nasa TV had planned to provide live coverage of the “extravehicular activity”, or EVA, operation by astronauts Thomas Marshburn and Kayla Brown.

The outing would be the fifth spacewalk for Marshburn, 61, a medical doctor and former flight surgeon with two previous trips to orbit, and the first for Barron, 34, a US navy submarine officer and nuclear engineer on her debut spaceflight for Nasa.

The objective is to remove a faulty S-band radio communications antenna assembly, now more than 20 years old, and replace it with a new spare stowed outside the space station.

According to plans, Marshburn was to have worked with Barron while positioned at the end of a robotic arm operated from inside the station by German astronaut Matthias Maurer of the European Space Agency, with help from Nasa crewmate Raja Chari.

The four arrived at the space station on November 11 in a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule.