Space Station & Shuttle Evade Debris

T.Hobbes writes: "There's an article at the BBC about the shuttle had to take evasive maneuvers to avoid the close (5km) transit of some rocket debris, and how the fuel consumed has cut short the shuttle's stay in orbit by one day. NASA also has an article about it." I know that minor maneuvers are common, but this one seems like a rather major move. Anyone want to bet on how long it will be before we have to establish some sort of clean-up effort in space?

Comments

They were moving the ISS, not just the shuttle

[Brento]

The Slashdot article doesn't make it quite clear enough that they weren't trying to keep the shuttle clear of the debris - they were trying to keep the space station clear of debris. That's why it consumed so much fuel (they had to budge the entire space station 3/4 of a mile.) It's easy to move the shuttle, much harder to use the shuttle as a tugboat.

Re:They were moving the ISS, not just the shuttle

[sohp]

Indeed, one of the roles of the Soyuz lifeboat (and the Progess) is to boost the ISS. Mission managers decided to use the shuttle in order to save consumables on those spacecraft. After all, the shuttle was headed home anyway, but they need the Russian craft for other things for a while.

As for the Russian modules, their propulsion gear was strictly for boost and initial docking and attitude control until the other modules arrived. The Progress couldn't tap into any residual fuel because there's no piping to hook up (that I know of)

Space.com article

[vanadium4761]

There is a more detailed article here.

Not as easy as you think

[s20451]

That's what you get when you leave your garbage in orbit! ... I dunno what they were thinking.

As with most issues in the space program, this is not as simple as it sounds. The debris in question is an old Soviet-era rocket booster, which travels into orbit along with whatever payload it's carrying. Unless some action is taken, it will circle the earth for hundreds of years until the extremely rareified upper atmosphere creates enough drag to bring it down. In order to remove these objects from orbit, you would have to install a retro-rocket system to bring it down on command, which would introduce complexity and cost quite a lot of weight. The debris has to come down somewhere, and if the de-orbiting device malfunctions, it will come down over Chicago rather than some isolated patch of the Pacific. Furthermore, most of the debris that people are worried about are not huge boosters, but tiny rice-grain-sized specs, which are impossible to track and account for.

I thought there was a space cleanup project

[Lumpy]

back in the late 90's nasa was working with the generation of aerogels to make a "space sponge" of a sorts. a huge frame holding a cube of aerogel inside to basically place in a low orbit, allow it to "sweep" for a while until it starts to gain a certain amount of damage and then de-orbit it.

I remember a huge segment on it from the show "beyond 2000" (the best tv show discovery ever had, and the morons cancelled it replacing it with a ton of animal crap)

Re:natural debris

[FTL]

> It has always blown my mind that the ISS doesnt have any maneuver capability,

It most certainly does. Check your facts.

> and why it wasn't placed in a geosync

Geosync is the most crowded orbital position we have. This is the last place you want to be if you are trying to avoid junk. Check your facts.

> or a higher circular orbit.

As it stands the shuttle is strained to the limit to get to the station. Infact Columbia (the heaviest of the four shuttles) can't reach the station where it is. Move it any higher, and you wouldn't be able to get to it. Check your facts.