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

[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?

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)

Duh!

[Calle Ballz]

That's what you get when you leave your garbage in orbit! Where'd they think it would go? the moon? Around orbit is just like that place behind your couch where you throw trash, no one sees it but eventually it will become a problem. I dunno what they were thinking.

Space.com article

[vanadium4761]

There is a more detailed article here.

"Deadly Litter"

[Alrescha]

James White wrote about this problem in 1964.

I could easily believe that someone wrote about the problem before that.

Deadly Litter (c) 1964 by James White,
ISBN 0-345-29640-0

A.

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.

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.

Discover had an article about this just recently

[wfaulk]

The Shooting Gallery

You need funding to clean up space.

[MongooseCN]

I'm sure politicians will only realize how much we need to clean up space after a shuttle crew dies from a collision with space debris. I mean right now our money is much better spent on that missle defence system. I mean after Sept 11th it's clearly missles we need to defend against, right?

Space Junk

[standards]

The real problem is that space junk leads to more space junk.

Space junk by itself isn't too bad. It's just some stuff that's floating around Earth's orbit.

The problem is that this space junk will collide with other space junk, leading to smaller, faster moving pieces of junk. This small, undetectable junk will smack into good equipment, leading to even more space junk. Before you know it, there's a chain reaction, and near earth orbit becomes an unsuitable wasteland of high velocity particles.

Just what we don't need.

And trust me, it's one thing to get and send down a spent rocket. It's a bit harder to remove a few thousand small shards of aluminum, paint and ceramic.

There is an immediate need to de-orbit as much space junk as possbile.

Re:Space Junk

[Waffle Iron]

The problem is that this space junk will collide with other space junk, leading to smaller, faster moving pieces of junk. This small, undetectable junk will smack into good equipment, leading to even more space junk. Before you know it, there's a chain reaction, and near earth orbit becomes an unsuitable wasteland of high velocity particles.

This scenario sounds like a certain late-70's video game. We can effectively solve this problem by installing a hyperspace button on every spacecraft. You just have to assign one of the crew members sit near the button at all times and look out for incoming debris.

Ya know...

[Talisman]

If they would just mount a frickin' laser beam on the Shuttle, this wouldn't be a problem. They should also mount lasers on the ISS. Anything that makes it more like a Death Star is tax money well spent.

Talisman

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.

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)

natural debris

[Veteran]

By far the biggest problem with collision in space comes from micro meteorites. The formula for the quantity of meteors of a given size is that the number of meteors is inversely proportional to the mass of the meteor. If there are 1000 1 Km asteroids in near earth orbit there would be about one million 100 meter asteroids. (Remember the mass of a sphere is proportional to the cube of its diameter.) That means that there are about a billion 10 meter rocks in near earth orbit - a trillion 1 meter rocks, 10 to the 15th 10 cm rocks, 10 to the 18th 1 cm rocks etc.

One of the problems that we humans have is over estimating our importance in the cosmic sphere - the universe hardly notices us - indeed the Earth hardly notices us; from low earth orbit it is very difficult to see anything that man has done on the Earth.

The space station - because of its size - has about 1/2 lb of drag due to the nascent atmosphere 250 miles up. This drag is why experiments in the station are referred to as "micro gravity" instead of "zero g"; there is a tiny gravitational field due to the drag. One of the reasons for the periodic shuttle trips is to reboost the space station to make up for the lost velocity from the residual drag.

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.

Re:natural debris

[DerekLyons]

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 [space.com] where it is. Move it any higher, and you wouldn't be able to get to it.

Height is not the problem at all, Columbia can easily reach the current altitude of the ISS. What Columbia can't easily do is reach the orbit of the ISS. The two sound the same, but they aren't really. To explain: (highly simplified)

A given booster can launch it's maximum weight to a given altitude launching at 0 degrees inclination, that is due East. (In the same plane as the Equator.) At that angle the booster gets the maximum help from the Earth's spin. As the angle of inclination increases (or decreases) the help from the Earth's spin goes down, and so does the payload to a given altitude. Minimum payload to a given altitude occurs at +/- 180 degrees, or due West. (You have to 'slow down' relative to the Earth before 'speeding up' to orbital velocity.)

The ISS is in a 52 degree orbit so that the Russians can reach it from their launch sites. The orbits they can reach are limited because of where the stages of the booster will drop early in the flight. Low inclinations require either dropping the stages on China, or choosing trajectories that require so much booster energy that useful payload drops dramatically. Since the Russian modules had to be launched more-or-less fully equipped, ISS had to be in an orbit they could effectively reach, thus causing the US to accept a major payload hit.

After her latest overhaul Columbia can in fact reach the station with a minimal payload. (Which is even specified in the article you referenced.) Check your facts.

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.

Geosync is crowded because for a given 'slot' (a chunk of orbit that can see directly a specific spot on the ground) there is a lot of competition. Also while there are a number of dead sattelites in the vicinity, there is almost no booster stages, debris from breakups, or 'lost' hardware. In fact geosync is highly desireable for debris avoidance because the relative velocities and absolute debris density are much lower. Check your facts.

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.

There was an article on this in discover magazine

[KnightElite]

Apparently, NASA is working on setting up cleaning efforts, and all the space agencies have agreed not to drop garbage off in space anymore. NASA is working on making their hulls more micro-meteorite proof due to all the floating garbage. To test new hull designs, they have the four most powerful guns in the world, which shoot pea sized bullets at various types of hull designs, at 15 000 m/s. That's in the latest issue of discover.