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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.
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
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...
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
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
"I did'nt think sound travelled in space."
That's true. The sound didn't travel through space, the sound travelled through the body of the space station and the air contained within it, not the vacuum of space.
Sound doesn't travel in a vacuum due to a lack of matter to vibrate through. If something impacted the hull the sound waves would be transmitted through the hull and through the atmosphere inside the space station.
There's no jumping off this one.
Actually, yes there is.
The ISS has a permanently docked Soyuz capsule for evacuation purposes.
Some details, here, also indicate that the incident you mention actually took place in 1997.
NASA also have info on the escape capsule.
UTC == GMT
According to the Houston Chronicle, among other sources, the incident took place at 1:59 am CST (0759 GMT) Wednesday.
Most spacecraft that fly in and out of the Earth's atmosphere have thick skins, to endure the stresses of launch and re-entry. Spacecraft that are solely designed to travel in the vacuum of space tend to be quite thin-skinned to save weight.
For example, the Apollo lunar module had a skin about the thickness of a pop can. Apparently the hatch would bulge outward when the module was pressurized -- I wish I could find a reference for that. There is also a story of a technician on the ground who clicked his pen against a high-pressue LM fuel tank during testing -- the click opened a pin-prick leak that amputated the technician's finger (that story is in "Apollo" by Murray and Cox).
The ISS was specifically designed to withstand impacts from space debris, so I would expect its hull to be a little thicker.
Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
I bet it's UTC, that's the timezone NASA uses on this cute StationLocation website...
but don't things as small as paing flecks cause serious damage at the kind of speeds space junk goes at?
I assume you mean "paint flecks", and the answer is that they may cause minor damage. The space shuttle Challenger took a paint fleck hit on one of its windows, which left a crater about a quarter inch in diameter. Apparently such minor pitting on the thermal tiles is considered routine in the shuttle program.
Even at orbital speeds, paint flecks don't have enough momentum to worry about. The big worry is the ball-bearing-sized debris, which is essentially impossible to detect, and which could deliver the impact energy of a hand grenade explosion.
Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
I believe that even the shuttle is able to cope with a hole in the hull close to an inch across long enough to do an emergency re-entry (of course if it's in the wrong part of the hull it's Columbia time again). So an ISS crew shouldn't have too big a problem with small meteorites, even if they had to seal off one module... the idea that all your air will leak out in seconds through a small hole is pure Hollywood.
BBC News now says that it wasn't hit by an external object and that the noice came from an internal instrument.
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
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.
Wikipedia has a decent explanation of the different time scales