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

Space Invaders

[Alien54]

We're going to have to get autocontrolled space going robots running from orbit, complete with little nets or something to cath the debris and knock the stuff out of orbit to burn up on re-entry. We wouldn't want to use completely hard projectiles because of the possible shrapnel. We want to avoid the "golden BB" effect, where a tiny bit of debris knocks out a 100 million dolar piece of equipment.

Not quite space invaders, but it would give a career path for alot of those video gamers out there.p.Although, gamers would tear their hair out trying to get used to the inherent latency of a spacecraft flying from orbit.

Re:Not as easy as you think

[treyb]

We actually have (at least) two usefull technologies for cleaning up space: tethers and wake shields. I don't know if the SVEC folks have considered building a wake shield specifically for NEO cleanup, though.

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

[FTL]

> It's easy to move the shuttle, much harder to use the shuttle as a tugboat.

Simple question: What happens if they spot a piece of junk heading at them when a shuttle isn't docked?

Obviously they would have this covered. The options I can think of are:

• One of the Russian modules has a propultion device, but can it fire when there's stuff docked to its rear end?
• The Soyuz lifeboat has engines, but does it have enough fuel to haul the station around and still return safely to Earth? Besides, the Soyuz is often docked at right angles to the V-bar, meaning it's engines would just make the station pinwheel.
• There is often a Progress cargo delivery ship docked, maybe it can tap into the Russian module's fuel and burn it useing its own engines?

Why?

[dangermouse]

Why is a five-kilometer clearance not good enough? Is it that the people tracking the two objects weren't certain enough of their calculations, or that it was likely something would alter the course of the rocket fragment? How far away from that 5km pass-by were the two objects when the call was made?

Just curious.

Laser guard for space station

[Rytsarsky]

BBC has this article about a laser "broom" being tested for use on ISS that could divert or destroy some debrit. Here is an exerpt from the article:

... there are some fragments about the size of a tennis ball which are big enough to pierce a spacecraft but too small to monitor easily. These intermediate bits of space junk are the target of Nasa's new laser space broom. This is a ground-based system that can locate and destroy or divert these fragments.

-JK