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Space Station Slowly Falling Apart?
Yoda2 writes "MSNBC discusses debris apparently seen by the crew floating away from the International Space Station. From the article, 'Such debris may include fragments of insulation, labels and possibly important components.' Yikes! Many of these quotes seem appropriate."
I wonder if it is all coming from the space station. There must be a lot of crap up there now... unless decaying orbits take care of that sort of thing?
Perhaps it is a sneaky astronaut out there snapping pieces off to frighten the others... All in good fun.
Interesting note, current ISS commander Michael Foayle was onboard Mir when they had the accident with the Progress vehicle. This guy seems to be really unlucky. It was Mir that was falling apart around him, this time it is ISS.
"The bolts are secured with a nut and a locking wire, and apparently one of them came free."
that's not likely to give anyone the warm fuzzies. locking wire doesn't come off unless it's the wrong size or it was used wrong. (like a nick in it which'll become a crack, or if applied backwards or such like.) either way, it's the sort of error that if done once due to incompetence, it was possibly done several times by the incompetent.
or the wire might have been cut by impact, but it's pretty strong stuff. that sort of impact would have been noticed and logged, i'd think.
anyway, hopefully this scotty quote stuff will settle down and perhaps we can get some space hardware junkies to comment. dig through your drawings, guys (gals?). does this indeed look like the soyuz hardware descibed? and are russian bolts locked down with stardard locking wire practice, or is it more of a custom pin system in this case and something was lost in the translation from tech to layman?
As a result, when you are in the station, you won't be able to find anything. This was a major issue with Mir and Skylab, probably it was with Salyuts as well. No one stows the experiment equipment once they use it, just straps it into a convenient location. If you do a space walk, the chances are it will be your first time outside of the space station and you will get lost, won't find what you are looking for and won't remember the training session you had a year ago in a boring, hot Texan day.
Labels are for convenience.
And fungus.
To simplify it, simple harmonic motion-- the movement of the ISS around the earth.
If you're on the ISS, and you "push" a bolt 1 foot below the station, without changing its orbital velocity, you have just moved the ellipse of the orbit of that object around the earth, but not changed its size.
So when you have travelled 180 degrees around the earth, the object will want to be one foot higher than the station; another 180 degrees and back to 1 foot below, etc, oscillating back and forth. This is one of the fundamental ways that "microgravity" differs from true zero-gravity.
The experiment container was carried into orbit aboard Challenger. Challenger was later lost in a launch incident.
The experiment container was retrieved from orbit and carried thru re-entry by Columbia. Columbia was later lost in a re-entry incident.
I've NEVER seen this mentioned in even the most wacko of conspiracy sites regarding the space program. This is to rich, I mean here it is, a solid link between the two incidents that resulted in loss of a shuttle. I mean it just doesn't get any better for those folks, here is an experiment that was carried on 2 shuttles, and both of those shuttles were subsequently lost during flight operations headed the same direction they carried LDEF. Challenger on the ascent, Columbia on the descent. Conspiracy? Curse? cmon, this is the stuff on which conspiracy sites thrive.
For those that really want to dig into it in a big way, LDEF was originally intended to be a 1 year mission, but, due to a few flight cancellations (after challenger accident) it turned into a much longer stay on orbit. In reality, the orbit retrieval was postponed a few times, to the point the experiment was almost lost to orbit decay before it was retrieved. C'mon all you conspiracy writers, here's a golden plot twist, why was the retrieval continually postponed almost to the point of loss, what were they hiding ????
ok, i've had my fun for the day, now I'll just sit back and wait to see how long it takes for some consipiracy author to pick up on this, and write a really cool twist to it all. Should be a great fun read when it happens.