Slashdot Mirror
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?
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.
What's your damage, Heather?
There is a more detailed article here.
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.
Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
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.
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
"Study your math, kids. Key to the universe." -The Archangel Gabriel
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)
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
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.
Just curious.