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)

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.