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ISS Fender Bender
wjsteele writes "Seems that the Space Station has had a minor fender bender. Sounds kind of scary... being in a space craft and hearing metal crunching (like an aluminum can.) Apparently some 'Minor' space debris struck the station around 2:30am this morning, while the astronauts were eating their wheaties." Update: 11/27 16:31 GMT by M : Looks like an experiment may be to blame.
Glad you included that, because times of day -- especially those lacking any sort of timezone information -- are extremely useful when referring to events that take place in space.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
It was just the aluminum foil on the stations main antenna.
Their insurance are gonna go up now, I hope they had comprehensive...
A 1999 study estimated there are some 4 million pounds of space junk in low-Earth orbit, just one part of a celestial sea of roughly 110,000 objects larger than 1 centimeter -- each big enough to damage a satellite or space-based telescope.
It's no wonder the ISS was hit. All they need is the space equivalent of the "adopt a highway" program, and a lot of plastic bags.
Pete Carr Owner Chatmag.com
Minor? If I was floating about in space in something with walls as thick as a tin can, I would be rather worried by now.
According to This article on BBC News Michael Foale is no stranger to this: "He was onboard the Mir space station in 1987 when a Progress supply tanker crashed into it - one of the most dangerous incidents to have ever taken place in space."
I'd still be crapping my pants though. There's no jumping off this one.
"Humans and aliens wrapped in two million, five hundred thousand tons of spinning metal, all alone in the night. It can be a dangerous place..."
The owls are not what they seem
Correct me if I'm wrong, but don't things as small as paing flecks cause serious damage at the kind of speeds space junk goes at?
I realise the junk might share the same orbit as the space station and have the same relative velocity blah blah, but consider just how slow it'd have to be moving not to rupture the hull.
I am one of many. My idea is not unique, nor do I expect my voice alone to sway you. I speak in a chorus of opinion.
Micheal Foale's got one of those sound effect key fobs.
Instead of the usual Grenade Launcher, Bazooka, Machine Gun noises, the new space version comes with 'crunching metal tin', 'airlock hiss' and 'oops, we lost a solar panel' noises...
Nice one Michael!
Doing what, pray tell? Eating their Wheaties or sucking each others dicks...? Hmmmmm?
I recall an insident with a space shuttle a few years ago. A flick of paint hit a window and left a fist-sized star in that window. That's the danger of space 30,000 km/s isn't a big deal in space, but having a collision at that speed is quite an impact.
So anyone who still think the movie Armageddon is based on scientific facts. (Remember the body being flung againt the windscreen and it didn't even have a scratch?) Think again...
Least it wasn't a micro meteroite which would of just punctured the ISS and caused massive decompression. Of course floating around where the only way down is 100 mile fall isn't an overally comforting idea
Rus
Cheap UK and US VPS
The spokesman, who spoke to the Associated Press on condition of anonymity, said by telephone that the space forces had detected an object along the station's orbit. They determined that the object was very small and would pose no danger to the craft.
Shouldnt they at the very least notify the crew to inform them of the junk nearby? And possibly practice a drill for this sort of thing.
Seems to me they lucked out this time, if that had been a bigger piece of junk which would cause major damage, and had ground control had seen it and not said anything, we would have plenty of different headlines this morning.
What time zone the ISS runs in?
I'd assume it was the same time zone as the ground control, but AFAIK, ground control for the ISS is split over various sites. I mean, you take a Russian and an American up there and you can be sure someone's gonna be bitchin' about jetlag on the way home...
This is one of the weirdest things I have heard of -
- Both astronauts heard it
- By this point they should be pretty familar with the noises the station makes - for example, the thermal expansion / contraction as you go through the terminator.
- It did not sound like an explosion (typical velocities of space debris impacts is 5 kilometers per second or so - and meteorites impact at even higher velocities), so it probably wasn't a piece of random junk.
- They got out the mobile camera and couldn't see anything damaged.
So what was it ? Let's hope it wasn't some valve or other part failing, but I suspect we will hear more of this.
"In case a piece of debris is big enough to threaten damage, the spacecraft are directed to a safer orbit."
Am I the only worried by this in that if there is a bit of junk they have to move. Surely if we keep polluting space then there eventually won't be another orbit.
If there was a bit of junk on the freeway it would be picked up and moved and in space we just avoid it
Rus
Cheap UK and US VPS
I did'nt think sound travelled in space.
Anyway; The ISS and the MIR stations - according to reports sound awfully like the space station in Armageddon (the movie - not the biblical doomsday).
"Russian Equipment, American Equipment.. its all made in Taiwan!"
// instant - "I for one welcome our new Decaff Coffee-Flavoured-Coffee Overlords"
The Russian Space Agency has just issued a simplier explanation. They've been trying to figure out what happened and came out with a different idea. No debris have hit the station. The sound was internal, coming from something that jammed a fan in the internal air ventilation system. This also has been confirmed by specialists from RosAviaKosmos (the company that built IIS =) Sorry, folks, the Mars attack theory will have to wait till next time =)
http://www.automatiq.se
Sounds like they need to do like in the anime Planetes, where the main characters are space garbagemen, and have to clear out debris.
The future equivalent of the UN pays bounties for clearing out certain debris, so each space corporation has a small department responsible for picking up the trash, and that department is not very well looked upon... It could become reality one day!
Because she didn't have time to be nice.
Perhaps this could lead to a situation ala Mission Critical
coordinated universal time.
Its is a printout of the code SCO needs to win its case, turned into an intersplanetary spitball.
I don't have any idea what could have caused this, but it wasn't something randomly floating around that just bumped the station. What disturbs me more than the accident itself is that professionals who should know better are floating this idea that it might be like a shopping cart hitting your car. It makes no sense at all.
Brackets contain world's first nanosig, highly magnified:[.]
Did anybody else read the title and think "Bite my shiny metal space station ass?"
Condemnant quod non intellegunt.
Really, eh. This is a dumb ass article to post - there is nothing but insipid karma whores that can be posted in relation to this story.
The scene... a silently rusting space station, somewhere in near Earth orbit.
"Honey,..."
"Yeah?"
"... I think I crashed the space station"
"WHAT?!!"
"Look, it wasn't my fault. Some space junk came out without stopping and I ran right into it!"
"Honey, baby, how often have I told you, DON'T DRIVE MY SPACE STATION. Sorry, I got a little emotional there."
"We're insured, aren't we?"
"Not over international territory. Right now we're about over Afghanistan. No coverage."
"I'm so sorry, I'll make it right..."
"OK, suit up, we're going out"
"No, I meant I'll bake some cookies"
"OK, get me a beer while you're at it."
Ceci n'est pas une signature
and aliens
You mean there are Europeans up there?
Not to refer to my secret orbiting battle station from which I intend to launch my bid for world domination as 'debris'
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
Space junk, half the size of the little finger nail has hit the International Space Station (of size approximately 20 VW beetles) today morning at 2.30am precisely. The junk was moving at a 1000 times the speed of a jumbo jet, and if hit head on could create a crater 0.0034 times the size of Philadelphia.
Must have been space debris intentionally put on a collision course with the ISS by terrorists !!!
...raise shields?!
Listening for the sound of the coming rain...
God... idiot moderators. They don't 'aluminium foil' in their antenna. The parent is a troll.
...they discover that a six pack of beer has been stowed away in the bathroom. And one can is missing...
We have to get serious about space debris. We can't do it half-heartedly, we can't use half-measures and we must learn from anime.
Cronenberg, who had not obtained permission to film from the American or Russian space agencies, was found outside the International Space Station by astronauts after they were awoken by what sounded like "a car being crashed". Upon investigation, the astronauts found Cronenberg discussing the result of a take with actor Elias Koteas and giving direction for the next.
"I can't believe he did this," said cosmonaut Alexander Kaleri from the space station. "This is not a movie studio."
The arrest comes only six months after Cronenberg announced that he was entering the X-Prize Contest, which promises an award of $10,000,000 US to the first privately-owned reusable spacecraft. Outside of a few die-hard fans of the director's work, no one had taken Cronenberg's entrace seriously.
"This really fucks things up for me," said John Carmack, the odds-on favourite in the contest. "If he posts bail and gets back up in space, then he wins the prize. I never knew he was this far ahead."
Cronenberg is being held in a washroom on the International Space Station pending a routine Soyuz supply flight. Sources at NASA say that it's possible he could be formally booked and bail set within as little as six days, giving him plenty of time to fulfill the X-Prize conditions.
Open-source programmer Richard Stallman could not be reached for comment, but sources close to the computing guru said he had been collaborating with Cronenberg for some time. "He was one of the paramedics in the first Crash," said a friend. "I think Cronenberg's making him a meteorite or something in this one."
Carousel is a lie!
they should of paid me (places pinkie on lips) the one meeelion dollars
Well, getting hit by space junk is not a screwup, unless you count carelessness about deorbiting stuff and not dropping wrenches while suited up and working outside the space station.
Your point is well taken, however, when you consider just how badly the space station is falling apart after just a short time in orbit (relative to it's planned lifetime).
Wont all the "space junk" fall down to earth eventually?
Russia: Space station was not struck
MOSCOW, Nov. 27 (UPI) -- Russian space officials denied Thursday the International Space Station had been struck by a foreign object, Gateway2Russia.com reported.
U.S. astronaut Michael Foale told NASA's Mission Control Wednesday a brief, metallic crunching noise he heard sounded as if something had hit the orbiting station.
Foale and Russian crewmate Alexander Kaleri were finishing breakfast when they heard the noise from the rear of the station's Russian module housing sleeping quarters, a kitchen and toilet.
"A noise was heard, similar to the sound of a tin being crushed. It lasted about one second," Sergei Gorbunov, spokesman for Russia's space authority Rosaviakosmos, told NTV television.
"Using external cameras the crew checked the paneling of the segment -- no damage was found," Gorbunov said. "The noise was most likely linked to some kind of device inside the station."
Interfax news agency quoted a Rosaviakosmos spokesman as saying that the noise may have come from a ventilator as has happened previously.
BBC News now says that it wasn't hit by an external object and that the noice came from an internal instrument.
'... a vaguely humanoid yet strangely reflective skinned figure placing a satellite dish and assorted space station parts into his torso before flying away in a strange shaped craft. Sound cleanup of the noise has revealed the mysterious but still slightly distorted message '.ou ca... bit... my shiny... etal... ass' Could this be the first evidence of an alien intelligence in the universe.?'
Isn't this what caused the Chernobyl meltdown? IIRC, the technical staff were being inventive and improvising around some safety tests.
I hope they did not spill any Tang.
It's now rated funny. It's not that funny, but I meant it to be a little funny. More of an ironic statment on the lackluster technological assemblage of a spacestation built by the lowest bidder, and running on Windows NT. Yeah. that's what I want floating in a tin can 60 miles above earth: to hear a crunching noise, followed by all screens displaying the infamouse BSOD.
This brings me to wonder... what time system and time zone (if any) do the astronauts use?
blog & fiction: jd87
That's a good one; I've never heard it before.
See what happens to astronauts who play electric guitar in space!
Ciryon
No one can hear you scream that it was the other guy's fault!
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
Nothing actually hit the space station, and everything is fine. See here, here, here, or just skip them all and see Google.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/3242712. stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/3242712. stm
--Y'know, this is a case where your vaunted "education" really kills the ENTERTAINMENT value of a movie. I thoroughly enjoy Armageddon every time I see it, because -IT'S A MOVIE- and I try not to read into it too much. Yeah, I recognized the "Mir gravity" as unrealistic, but it didn't get in the way. They did a great job on the plot and visual effects. I even got emotional over Liv Tyler's scene with her dad making the heroic sacrifice.
--Cut them some slack, at least it wasn't as bad as Battlestar Galactica. (And if you lower your expectations, you could probably enjoy even that, too.)
--You could pick apart the whole LOTR trilogy too, if you wanted to; but personally I figure it's better to just sit back and try to enjoy the ride. Don't over-analyze everything.
--People are just getting too "sophisticated" these days. Everybody's got their nose up in the air and we all walk around thinking how well-educated and how great we all are. Yeah, we've "sophisticated" ourselves right out of a good imagination and we can't enjoy anything anymore. And Hollywood keeps making crappy movies because idiots keep paying to see it.
--All our base are belong to India while stupid people over here work 12+ hour days, when more people should be hired to spread the work around. No wonder the economy is so damn bad.
.
== WolfriderV6 == I'm willing to admit that *I just might* be wrong... Are you??
The spacecraft that fly in and out of the earth's atmosphere do not need thick skins. Take the shuttle - the outside of that is not thick skinned, the underside is thermally shielded against re-entry heat (And that isn't even that strong, when a peice of foam can knock it off). That's why they fly in at a given angle, because all of the heat is concentrated on the thermal pads. Furthermore, the reason that objects designed to fly in outerspace and never return in-tact (such as rocket boosters) are not thermal padded is because, on exit, you don't receive the same thermal force you do as you do on re-entry.
I didn't know space stations have fenders. That is about as dumb as putting wings on a space ship. Wait... Nevermind.
I thought it was just sexist, xenophobic ranting.
[irritated pedant]
"2:30am this morning"? As opposed to, say, 2:30am in the evening? ARGH!!!! Either use "am", or "this morning". Not both. I may be the first person to notice this, but the [grammar/spelling/repost/factuality] checking of the is often very poor! Has anyone else noticed this?
[/irritated pedant]
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
UTC == GMT - daylight savings time.
How many more people must die in useless space experiments before people realize NASA is a useless money-pit stealing funds from desperately underfunded reforms here on Planet Earth? We need to dismantle NASA now before it's too late - Imagine what would happen if one of these space installations should come down over a populated area?
If that had read read "you mean there are americans up there" it would have been modded as flamebait.
Hardly fair to us Europeans is it ?
Oh and yes, there are 2 europeans up there and no septics.
As if they can tell this from an inspection? Didn't analysis of the Columbia space shuttle debris on takeoff show there was no risk, only to have it disintegrate on reentry?
Mencken had it right. So glad that's old news.
I thought it said IIS fender bender. I was trying to figure out why the space station was running IIS, and figured this was another microsoft-bashing article.
I have blog like everyone else
...a self proclaimed rocket scientist like everyone else here. I just want to see their crapped pants!
If you don't have pictures of their crapped pants then don't bother me with astronaut stories.
Well, actually the Soyuz can't be *permanently* docked, or it wouldn't be very useful as an evacuation vehicle. How about 'long term'?
But there is another consideration. The Soyuz has a shelf-life, and they periodically have to change the thing out, anyway. Every so often a Soyuz mission will come up, and take the rescue capsule down, leaving their original transport as the new rescue capsule.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
They really should consider putting up a garbage detection and deflection system and it could be based and controlled from the ISS. Basicly a few radar satelites and a dozen or so robots that move about in ordit with bumber plates to deflect garbage into the atmosphere. Too bad vacume cleaners would work in space.
Plus if there were a dozen or so, if one malfunctioned it could be rescued by another and brought back to the ISS for servicing. They could be both radio isotope and thrust fueled and could be refueled at the ISS. Relativly simple robots and it could lead the way for robotic repair bots for satelite repairs.
Unless you know what time standard is used on the space station, the assertion that something happened to the space station at 2:30am this morning only gives you the approximate position of the space station relative to the earth and sun during the event. You can't deduce the longitude or Earth surface local time from it, because the space station will have had that relative position multiple times on any given morning.
So how do they handle time out there? I'll bet it involves the word 'Zulu' because that sounds really cool over the radio in movies.
This sort of thing has cropped up before, and it has always been due to human error.
------DO NOT WRITE BELOW THIS LINE------
Moreover, a can that until recently contained beer of almost homeopathic strength, probably with a picture of a kangaroo on the label.
Greenwich Mean Time is called Mean because it is the time averaged over a year, if you get the idea. It isn't the real time on account of the 3 degrees or so of wobble of the earth on its axis. The block where I live is pretty much bang on geographical North - South, so shadows around midday can be observed over time. The midday alignment can vary by as much as 12 minutes from 'clock' time, in advance or retarded depending on the season.
And now the sums: 12 mins = (hrs in day x mins in hr) x (3 degrees/360 degrees), or (24*60)*(3/360).
Someone correct me if this is bollocks.
(24*60)/(3/360)
Ahem.
All they heard on the ISS was a noise. Checks for external damage haven't found anything yet. Surely you hear hear the occasional weird noise in your apartment/house; that doesn't mean it was hit by a meteor, does it?
Surely the astonishing finding is that there would appear to be no on-board vibration (sound) sensor array networked to a computer which could accurately determine the source and probable nature of the disturbance. Or does that feature come with v2.0?
All these young morons with sporty little space stations, driving up the premiums for the rest of us responsible space inhabitants...
Please help metamoderate.
In space, what comes around, goes around.
Because they're fucking moranheads.
heard the noise from the rear of the station's Russian module housing sleeping quarters, a kitchen and toilet.
Either send up some of those breath right strips or review the menu.