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Space Station Slowly Falling Apart?

Posted by michael on from the baling-wire-and-duct-tape dept.

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."

4 of 341 comments (clear)

  1. hmm by Rotting · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  2. Re:So... by M1FCJ · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  3. Re:Labels? wtf?! by M1FCJ · · Score: 5, Interesting
    Something people don't understand is once you've been up there, most probably you won't go back again unless you are lucky/have a good relationship with management. Most people go to space for at most three times, only one has been there for seven times. Russians have a smaller cosmonaut team. This means they can actually have people experienced with the actual thing. Two years of training and two weeks on the shuttle is nothing compared to the russian cosmonauts' flying time experience.

    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.

  4. Re:Definitely ISS debris by mlyle · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.