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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.
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!
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
UTC == GMT
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
I don't reply to Anonymous Cowards
Right...
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.
...raise shields?!
Listening for the sound of the coming rain...
...they discover that a six pack of beer has been stowed away in the bathroom. And one can is missing...
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!
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.
'... 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.
This brings me to wonder... what time system and time zone (if any) do the astronauts use?
blog & fiction: jd87
Ciryon
space debris' orbitals are pretty easily predictable, why not shoot them out of orbit with a projectile?
Because the idea is to have less crap floating around in Earth orbit, not more. If the collision between one of your projectiles and its target is of sufficient force, the debris will become a scattered cloud of fragments. Something the size of the fingernail on your pinky put a crater into the windshield of one of the shuttles, do we really want a cloud of them up there?
The laser beam idea might be feasible, but then again, maybe not. SDI turned out to be a lot harder to create than everyone thought, and that dealt with large moving objects traveling predictable paths. Plus you've got to worry about something that you don't want to hit being in the line of fire, which is slightly less of a concern when what you want to hit are nuclear warheads heading for your cities.
Call me crazy, but I think the idea of a few autonomous space trash trucks cruising around up there and picking up errant junk seems like the way to go, once technology has advanced sufficiently to permit it.
~Philly
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
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 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
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------
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.
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?
Wikipedia has a decent explanation of the different time scales