Mother of space station astronaut dies in crash

CHICAGO (Reuters) - The mother of a U.S. astronaut who has been in space since October was killed when a freight train hit her car at a railroad crossing near Chicago, police said on Thursday.

Daniel Tani's 90-year-old mother, Rose, died on Wednesday as her son was aloft in the International Space Station. He was told of her death but is not scheduled to return to Earth until next month.

A NASA spokeswoman said there was no impact on space station activities and Tani was working on a science experiment on Thursday, as scheduled.

Police in the town of Lombard, Illinois, west of Chicago, said Tani's mother was behind a school bus stopped at a crossing when the gate went down. She drove around the bus onto the tracks and was struck, they said.

Tani's mother had spent time in a U.S. internment camp where Japanese immigrants and Japanese-Americans were sequestered during World War Two.

In a video posted earlier on NASA's Web site, Tani sent Christmas greetings and noted it was a surprise that he would be spending the holiday in space, since he was originally scheduled to be home by now, for "a time when we all get together."

Tani had been scheduled to return to Earth on Wednesday, but his ride home remains stalled at the launch pad. NASA tried twice to launch shuttle Atlantis on December 6 and 9, but postponed the flight due to technical problems.

During an astronaut-cosmonaut exchange program in 1995, NASA's Norman Thagard was left with a despondent Russian commander who went into isolation aboard the Russian outpost Mir after learning of his mother's death.

After Thagard's flight, NASA established a practice of asking crewmembers if they would want to be told of tragic or disturbing news while in space.

(Reporting by Michael Conlon)

(Additional reporting by Irene Klotz in Florida)