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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."
For those of you who can't get to it, don't worry--you didn't miss much. It's just a compilation of Scotty quotes, and contrary to the submitter's assertion, hardly any of them apply to the current situation.
Unless, of course, the ISS has warp drives.
Or is in the midst of battle with Klingons.
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
So what we're saying is, Mir was actually pretty damn good.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
It's the INTERNATIONAL Space Station. So you can't go blaming the Americans even though they do contribute the bulk of the efforts towards the project.
... if the Enterprise were ever let to run down to such a state?!
It wouldn't be pretty...
Is this a nice way of saying that a slothful astronaut got sucked out into space?
True story.
Race: Payload checklist. IRS surveillance satellite --
Buzz: Check.
Race: Ant farm --
Buzz: Check.
Race: Children's letters to God --
Buzz: Check.
--- Deep Space Homer
include fragments of insulation, labels and possibly important components
Labels? Like "Canadarm" or "U.S.A." ? Please don't tell me there's a Taco Bell billboard up there too!
Remebers me of the "Armageddon" movie - the "russian" kind of repair-method
*kick*slam* hey ! it works !
The line between trolling and humor is thin.
Spelling mistakes: My is english spoken not tongue of mother.
There goes the $10,000 wrench. There goes the $20,000 hammer...
There's a growing sense that even if The Future comes,
most of us won't be able to afford it.
-- Lemmy
America pays all the bills!
This clearly has to be the bottle of finegrain Wodka I lost just the other day !
Slashdot: stuff for news, nerds that matter, matter for news, stuff that nerd
Cosmonaut
Astronaut
Cosmonaut
Astronaut
Cosmonaut
21908uje12~~!~~~
[END TRANSMISSION]
Trolling is a art,
Did anyone else read that as "the crew was floating away from the space station"? I thought "Damn, things *are* getting bad..."
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.
The article clearly states the piece was from the Progress or Soyuz spacecraft docked to the Space Station. It is a part that locks down the solar panels on these craft.
HCG 50a = 2MASX J11170638+5455016
11h17m06.4s +54d55m02s
Abort the mission.
Yeah, they should have just let the British build it.
Nah, all that leaking oil floating around in low orbit would pose a threat to other spacecraft.
Trolling is a art,
1) I always knew that such an international collaboration is succeptible to fragmenting.
2) Someone send in Tom Ridge with plastic wrap and duct tape.
3) In ISS, the computers defrag you!
4) The ISS -- Modular programming at its finest.
5) ISS -- I could have sworn it was Apache Station
6) NASA is waiting for an official patch for ISS
7) Aussie quoted: "pull yourself together, mate! Yer fallin apart!"
8) ISS -- where do you want to fragment today?
My brother once tried to convince me and my dad that his 13 year old JAG was designed to leak oil. Suppose to keep the frame rust free....
the article says the piece was Russian, and is most likely part of one of the explosive bolt assemblies that holds the solar panels in the stowed position during launch.
They're going to move the Canadarm into position to take a look at the solar panels on the Progress that recently docked, to see if the part is missing.
Yes, it is station debris. The odds of anything passing within view of the crew is very, very small unless it came from the vehicle they are in. The kind of debris that is being talked about here (possibly launch stow clamps for Progress/Soyuz solar panels) is quite small and would be extremely difficult to see from greater distances. These parts are used to hold the solar panels in the folded position during ascent and are no longer needed once the spacecraft is in orbit and the panels unfold.
The station normally has a Soyuz docked (for crew escape) and a Progress docked (for resupply and refuelling and trash stowage.) That's four solar panels right there. In addition, the Russian station modules (except for the Pirs airlock) have their own solar panels, as they operated autonomously at first, and provided power to the US modules earlier in the assembly sequence before the larger US array was added.
The biggest worry is that one of these pieces could impact the station and damage it.
i am a soviet space shuttle
On MIR, when this happened, they just shipped up more vodka from the gravity well.
Pretty soon, no-one cared that they were floating in a tin-can far above the world.
Problem solved.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
It must be cold in space for that to happen. But when you gotta go, you gotta go!
Objects in Mir are closer than they appear.
Ooops. Wrong station.
Just another day on the ISS when...
(Carl) Hey, Herb - there's something floating outside
(Herb) Well, take a picture of it with the camera on the robotic arm, for goodness sake!
(Carl) Uh, Herb, we have a problem. It *IS* the robotic arm.
I think it would be a godsend to American space program. They would just cancel it and that would be it. No more budget black holes. Back to fixing Hubble and everything that really matters gets funding. It might be a conpiracy. These are not the bolts you are looking for.
part of the explosive restraining bolt assembly, that keeps the solar panel stowed during launch. Once it get's into orbit, the bolt's are blown apart, and the solar panel's deploy, so they're not needed once the Progress is in orbit.
The pieces of the bolt are supposed to stay secured to the spacecraft with restraining wire (so that you don't have bolts and stuff tumbling around in the same orbit with you). The article says they're going to move the Canadarm into position to check to see if one of these restraining bolts is missing.
MSNBC discusses debris apparently seen by the crew floating away from the International Space Station.
The crew saw debris as they were floating away from the ISS!? It sounds like the more alarming story is the fact that the ISS is losing crewmen! :)
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
everything these days is built to the minumum specifications by the lowest bidder...
Now who's up for that one-way trip to Mars???
A long while ago, somebody* called Mir "The Orbiting Space Barge of Death." Perhaps the ISS could be renamed "The International Space Barge of Death."
/. poll, but I couldn't locate the source.)
*(I wanna say it was from an old
C'mere you!
*smack* "Falling apart" is just a saying. *smack* Now say it! *smack* Say it! *SLAP* That's right. *biff* Now who's yer daddy? *pow* Yeah, I thought so. *wham* Now, get back to work. *bonk*
--- Ban humanity.
Now I see why they want to build the next one on the moon. No parts lost in space, just collect and reassemble...
"the International Space Station. From the article, 'Such debris may include fragments of insulation, labels and possibly important components.'"
Anyone else curious why they would put LABELS on the outside of ISS? (THIS SIDE UP!)? I wonder how many UFO's have read them yet..
Mod +5 Drunk
Wah!
That first paragraph prented as the headline is a bit inaccurate. Basically the article goes on to explain that the part in question is part of an explosive bolt, read, disposable. The space station is not falling apart as out slashdot editors would have us believe.
Images of the object were sent to the Russians, and the boltlike object looked familiar. "Preliminary info from Moscow indicates that the eyebolt may be from the Soyuz solar arrays," the NASA report said. "Four of them are used to safe the [solar array] during launch with a hook mechanism, which is released via [explosive bolt] after insertion [into orbit]. The bolts are secured with a nut and a locking wire, and apparently one of them came free."
The same bolts are used both on the Soyuz crew transport spacecraft and on Progress, the Russian-built cargo-only ship. Both vehicles are currently docked at the station, and NASA sources said Tuesday the Russians now believe the piece actually came off the Progress, which arrived at the space station at the end of last month. In the past, during periods of strong rhythmic thumping on an exercise device, the solar arrays on docked Soyuz and Progress craft can be observed to jiggle.
Vehicals in orbit are falling, they just have enough forward velocity to miss.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
From IMDB:
Lev Andropov: Excuse me, but I think I know how to fix this.
Watts: Move it! You don't know the components!
Lev Andropov: [annoyed] Components. American components, Russian Components, ALL MADE IN TAIWAN!!!
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
I'm sorry Dave, I can not do that. It fell off already.
my head injury from Skylab just cleared up 3 days ago, now I have to worry about this.
Kapton tape, which is essentially used as space duct tape, erodes in the presence of atomic oxygen. Atomic oxygen (just a single O, not the usual stable O2) is quite reactive, and will eat away many materials on the leading edge of spacecraft. Atomic oxygen is found more in the lower orbits (i.e. ISS and space shuttle) rather than the higer orbits (geosynchronous). Here are some pictures from the experiment.
(yep, I'm a former rocket scientist)
HIV Crosses Species Barrier... into Muppets
and if these pieces are coming to earth... I think it may be time for me to add an extra layer of protection to my tinfoil hat.
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.
Yeah, you know, the "caution, reading this from outside the space station amy cause you to implode." and the "Unleaded Fuel Only." and of course the "Oxygen in use, avoid all sparks or open flames." Oh, and the bumper sticker"My other shit can doesn't orbit."
The debris seen floating away from the ISS pales in comparison to the latest piece of ejecta.
Apparently, the communication module for the ISS broke away last week, and was large enough to survive re-entry to the earth's atmosphere.
Officials tracked the piece via radar until it impacted somehwere in NYC.
Officials now say they have located the piece, which is in the possession of a street rapper named J-pod. When asked if he would return the piece to scientists for further investigation, he replied, "No WAY, dog...this thing bumps so loud and picks some so many stations...I ain't givin' it back to NObody!"
(with apologies to SNL for their original piece on skylab way back when)
Damn mods, I've never been modded +anything for funny. This was my best attempt. I'm a complete failure. MUST POST SOMETHING FUNNY!
Mod +5 Drunk
I gotta get me some of those bills!
--- Bwah?
...the stuff we know about. We had a discussion about this at work recently, and noted that if you wanted to point a camera looking *forward* and *below* for any departing debris.
Mix the failings of Usenet with the shortcomings of the World Wide Web and the result is slashdot.
I don't quite understand how they just assume these are russian parts floating away? I certainly would find it a bit disturbing whatever it was though... maybe they should have used duct tape?
I'm surprised that nobody else noticed this (too busy making Scottie jokes) but read this paragraph from the end of the MSNBC article:
So, what happened? Was this "aggressive safety program" discontinued after Apollo or just ignored when chunks of foam fell off the fuel tank and hit Columbia?
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
From what I've read, NASA (or maybe the White House) isn't as keen on the ISS as the Russians would like us to be, and they've expressed concern that we might be looking to back out of it in some way or another. Here's one link I dug up, but not the best: http://www.space.com/news/russia_iss_011106.html The upshot is, the US can afford to abandon the ISS if necessary, but it'll practically bankrupt Russia. Wouldn't be too good for relations.
Look back up at my post, now look back down, you're on the Internet. Now look back up. I'm a signature.
I sure hope they don't lose the Blue Alert bulb.
No, it's the manufacturers who keep everything closed-source.
Be realistic. While the US backing out of the ISS project would have a catastrophic impact on Russia's space program, it wouldn't bankrupt Russia.