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ISS Gyro Fixed Via Spacewalk
Teahouse writes "After a failed attempt last week, the ISS Astronauts finally got to fix the external gyroscope circut breaker in the station. Tests are being run today, but it looks like the ISS is back to having attitude stability with redundancy. This is particularly significant with the Shuttle being grounded for an extended period because the ISS would have had to use thruster fuel to keep the Station's solar panels pointed in the right direction without the gyroscopes, and no guarantee when more fuel would be arriving."
but it looks like the ISS is back to having attitude stability
Did they put it on Prozac?
So... Mir died of Russian neglect, and so early into its mission the ISS seems to be dying of US neglect. Even if shuttle missions resume the importance of the ISS in US plans has been eclipsed by a moon base and a Mars mission. Lots of people criticize the ISS because it was largely conceived with politics in mind moreso than economics or science. Surely they hate the new US direction even more -- billions more will be blown, over the course of far more administrations who will always be gunning to kill it for more cash -- just to give the impression of superiority over the Chinese. I say either fund and finish the ISS or start a new economical, science-based space project from scratch. But moon bases? Please, ISS doesn't deserve to fall apart for this...
I thought for a moment that a gyro in IIS got fixed via a spacewalk. I never knew that there was a gyro in IIS requiring a spacewalk to fix, but it might explain the bugs.
READY.
PRINT ""+-0
Specifically, the line "Why is this room here" when they're in thec hompers room. Note to self, when designing something where it is incredibly dangerous to go outside and fix, spring for the extra twenty feet of cable and put the circuit breaker INSIDE THE DAMN SHIP.
meh
Now *THIS* is a gyro!
(on second thought, this joke isn't very funny. posting anonymously anyway.)
I'm sure a lot of people are going to use this malfunction and (necessarily) hazardous repair as an indictment of the current investment in manned, shuttle-based spaceflight.
However, until NASA has a better platform, they will probably continue to use the shuttle.
Perhaps if the open source movement were to desing and implement a shuttle replacement, we might have a working replacement faster than if NASA were told they have to come up with a cheaper faster replacement.
For those thinking of suggesting that Soyuz would work, might I remind you that every Soyuz capsule is a one time use vehicle. Even when everything goes right, it doesn't get re-used. It has no airlock, so either everyone gets suited up, or no-one does a space walk. It has no payload capability, so no sattelite recovery. It has no manipulator arm, so you can't rely upon it for doing sattelite maintenance as the shuttle crew has.
The shuttle may not be perfect. It was designed for a set of missions that have very little to do with what it is doing now. (The military provided some of the specs to support black projects, few of which have ever been attempted.)
The Civilian side of the project was to haul people and material to and from the space station that was being desinged by NASA, which was not the international space station. It was also decided to use it to deploy sattelites as well once the capacity of the payload bay was defined.
As a jeep, the shuttle has done an ok job. If you think we need a better design, I am all for it. Start working on that better desing, and give us status reports as you find the time.
Thank you for your support.
... welcome our new gyroscopic overlords!
;)
Oh... come on... you were missing those silly jokes to!
Unfortunately, nobody appears to understand that with the shuttles grounded indefinitely, the International Space Station provides one of the few opportunities for the United States to safely (relatively speaking) evaluate new technology in the precise environment that it must function properly in. Hypotheses and simulation, after all, often differ from reality. And with their newly aggrandized objective to ensure "complete astronaut safety," shouldn't NASA be utilizing every resource in its arsenal?
Do you like German cars?
They spend all their simply MAINTAINING the station. Not much actual science happens aboard the debacle called ISS.
T minus 5 seconds until -1 flamebait...........
The station's computer is still complaining of an ongoing fault in the AE-35 unit.
can someone explain how gyros work w/o talking about calculus and conservation of angular momentum?
... to put a giant laser on the moon developed by Alan Parsons and call it the death star? Minime! Stop humping the laser!
This must be a new technique for preparing gyros. Around here gyros are made in the kitchen.
Know your pads. One time pad: good for cryptography. Two timing pad: where to take your mistress.
And I thought for a moment that someone was fixing a Gyro for dinner.
[100% ISO 646 Compliant]
SVM, ERGO MONSTRO.
http://www.nasatechnology.com/ NASA's byproducts make the missions thus far almost pale in compairson, if you're actually so spiritually devoid that you consider exploring your own universe, that which sustains you, a waste of money. Hell, if the USA hadn't invaded IRAQ we could have given NASA 10x its budget, and learned about us, as a species, a people, a planet, a consciousness. And yet, here we are, grounding our efforts because a few people died tragically. It's sad, yes, but so it sending thousands to their death for a questionable cause. How can we value life more in war, but less in understanding ourselves as people? The Earth spins round and round. It's all a mystery.
We are one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively. Back to you with the weather, Bob!
"The NASA of today should focus on the practical, useful aspects of space, instead of being used as a political tool by whatever president is in office." pratical? spiritual? I agree it shouldn't be used as a tool, but no matter what we do in space, with humans there, as of 2004, we will learn remarkably more than we know now about how we live, who we are, and where we can go.
We are one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively. Back to you with the weather, Bob!
They have more people. Are you really that suprised that 4x as many people can accomplish more, when organized just as well? The primary tension in the world these days is the coalescing of major governments into a single entity because it threatens the ways of those who many not concus with the bulk. It is the struggle between the few and the many that drives us as a people. There is, however, a big difference between the USA and China, and it is this: While China has people working just to barely survive, even the homeless in the USA can find drinking fountains and food. As I could say, stronger than the words of Jesus himself, the human society just needs Star Trek replicators. All problems solved.
We are one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively. Back to you with the weather, Bob!
"Why build a space station? Since the beginning of the Space Age the stations that have flown have fallen short of the ideals of space advocates and science fiction writers, who foresaw orbiting hubs of transportation and commerce--the giant spinning station from 2001: A Space Odyssey, complete with Pan Am shuttles and a Hilton hotel, being perhaps the best-known example. Instead, the space stations that have been built have been, at best, modest conglomerations of modules and solar arrays, serving as cramped homes for two or three people who spend much of their time simply keeping their station operating. The justification for such facilities has been rooted primarily in geopolitics--first Cold War competition, now international cooperation--coated with a thin veneer of science."
"Yet there is a far more important purpose for a space station, argues Robert Zimmerman in his book Leaving Earth. Space stations, he believes, are essential proving grounds for the eventual human exploration of the solar system. Space stations allow scientists to find out how people can handle extended periods of weightlessness, as well as how they can--or sometimes can't--get along with fellow crew members in cramped quarters. Stations also offer an opportunity to develop and test key technologies needed for interplanetary journeys, particularly life support systems, as well as test the resourcefulness of crews to carry out repairs in space. While politicians may have been motivated to fund space stations for foreign policy or other political reasons, the various space stations built and flown to date have gone a long ways towards achieving those exploration goals."
The full article is on the web: Review: Leaving Earth by Jeff Foust, The Space Review.
Space exploration and science is expensive. We need to finish ISS before we move to the moon. If we can't even finish ISS, what's the chance the moon will be successful? The moon is 10x farther than ISS orbit, and probably cost 20x more to get there.
I'm going to go ahead and admit that I've never designed a space faring vessel. That said, I'm going to go ahead and give these people the benefit of the doubt and assume that in piecing this thing together, they worked as well as they could under the money and time constraints they exist in that they could. These people all know lives are at stake and most probably have a passion for it. The point is, it may be obvious. Some fool would say hindsight 20/20, but seriously, in something THAT SOPHISTICATED if we don't have obvious comments for improvement after an incident that occurs, I'd be suprised. Naturally, any problem that occurs on a sophisticated product will always have any easy solution: why didn't they just blah blah That's a main reason Microsoft gets raped in the tech community. hehe
We are one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively. Back to you with the weather, Bob!
You're confusing 'risk' and 'return'. People haven't put their investments into US companies because they knew their investment was safe, they did it because they felt they could get a high rate of return on their money. If they wanted a safe investment, they would buy US treasury securities, currently the safest investment on Earth.
Now, they're investing more money in the Chinese economy, because they feel that Chinese companies will grow faster (and thus provide a higher rate of return). That's not terribly surprising, as it's easy to see that China has enormous economic growth potential. Much the same occurred with southeast Asia in the early-to-mid 1990s, until their bubble collapsed.
It can do basic, medium and even some high-tech manufacturing for a fraction of the price to do so in the US.
The reason for this is not some magic, but because China has vastly lower labor costs. To some extent, this is because China uses a huge amount of slave labor.
All employees must wash hands before seeking equitable relief.
Well, the shuttle was successful in repairing the gyros on the ISS, so that it could be pushed away from the Terrible Secret of Space. That's got to count for something.
All employees must wash hands before seeking equitable relief.
It's clear that Russia designs things to be used once and replaced. It's a good strategy. Look at their spacesuits: Russia intends for them to be used up and then discarded, provided extras. Whereas the USA sends up very specific space suits which must be carted up and down from space for restoration. To suggest that a maintenance plan is better than a "brute force" approach is questionable at this point. Frankly, I like how Russia does space. They keep it simple, they send backups. Then again, the USA's refusal to use disposable technology drives our innovation. Let's just consider that that both ways are valid, and we're all humans trying to explore our existence. What is space travel? Just hanging out above the air because you can? Don't you have any interest in what's out there?
We are one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively. Back to you with the weather, Bob!
You've got to understand that when Bush says something like that, he doesn't really mean "completely." If you take the words "complete astronaut safety" literally, it's obviously a ridiculous concept. We're talking about going to Mars for heaven's sake! I can't drive to work in "complete" safety. How the heck are we going to propel several people several dozen miles per second to land for the first time in history on a planet with no breathable atmosphere in "complete" safety? I can only quote Inigo Montoya: "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."
Bush says stuff like this all the time. Here's another example from a 2002 speech he gave on education:
Now I ask you, how likely is it that this president is actually going to make sure that "every, single child" enters school "ready to learn"? A short drive around any city will show you that we'd be doing very well just to make sure that "every, single child" has a safe place to sleep.
Bush is a man of extremes and absolutes. It actually works out well for him much of the time, as it leads to a simple message that makes people feel good and often gets picked up in media. But you've got to remember that his words don't mean what you think they do, and you've got to look a little deeper.
"attitude stability with redundancy"
Wish my ex-gf had that =/
You did observe the quotation marks, didn't you? To clarify, my usage of that statement was intended to be sarcastic. ;-)
:-)
Regarding Bush, however, I agree... completely.
Do you like German cars?
This is the first time I have seen the Iraq-Space analogy drawn. It all seems so simple now. We definitely need to beat Shrub over the head with this.
...but a gyroscope with a circuit breaker placed OUTSIDE THE SPACE STATION strikes me as a typical American design decision.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
And just what idiot made it an external circuit breaker?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
We seem to have this fear of someone dying in space, or re-entry, and keep grounding the Shuttle. But all things considered I'd rather die on a shuttle flight than in bed -- unless it's in bed with Raquel Welch, that is.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
The Shuttle costs around $1 bil each launch. If you figure that the average NASA or NASA contractor employee makes about $50k a year and has a working lifetime of about 40 years, that's about $2 mil per working lifetime in salary. Thus the equivalent of 500 people put their life's work into each launch. A person's life's work is not the same as his life, but it's in the ballpark. The shuttle's construction is far more complicated than just launching it once, so to say that the shuttle is more valuable than its crew is true. It is the life's work of thousands upon thousands of people. Something like the shuttle is one of the only artifacts we have that is comparable to, for instance, the cathedrals of Europe in its scale.
Unfortunately for the chinese people, their system of government seems to have accepted corruption as a way of life. Corruption just doesn't work very well. It insures that the person or organisation best qualified to do the job probably won't be the one to get it. It prevents workers from organising to get a share of the profits, which leads to more spending power and more motivation to work. It prevents fundamental social and economic problems from being fixed my laws. It holds back almost all collective progress.
However, since we seem to have fully taken for granted the advances of progressive campaigners that we enjoy, we're sliding back down toward's china's level. Hopefully our remaining democratic structures will keep it from getting too bad.
no mod points.
you rock.
They already have plans ready, why NOT Google? :)
Mal-2
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
no it went more like this...
pr comes in. day after day, the technicians couldn't understand why the thermoelectric discombubulator kept blowing fuses. they tried replacing the chickenelectrometer. they tried replacing the positronic ejector. they even tried pressing the reset button. by about the 11th day they were so sick of replacing the fuses on the thermoelectic discombubulator (which you must access with a 1m discombubulator defuser through the equivalent of a mouse hole in a panel with two giant 02 vents mounted side by side blowing in your face the whole time) just to test the new fix that they mounted the fuse box on the outside of the said module. Good thing they did... they finally figured out... it was the flux capacitor. anyways, some guy came through the room about two weeks later and said, "Ship It!" and, well you know the rest.
it's really that sophisticated.
There's a -ton- of stuff up there, all bolted together, all brought up in stages, over time, on various rocket systems.
... but I guess there's a reason for it.
All that gear needs to be brought up slowly.
Sure, if we had mega-ton capable boosters, we could build a nice exoskeleton and put it all inside with room for boots, but since its all going up, slowly, bit by bit, and must be assembled up there, cables go where they can, in relation to the rest of the project.
I think we've got the assembly wrong, however, personally. I don't know why we're limiting ourselves to tubes and cans (booster hardware, yeah, i know) that need to be bolted together, when with a little more serious robotics and industrial process "space-a-fy'ing" we could be blowing big bubbles out of the raw material instead, and having more controlled space to work in and around for less energy
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
If you're still name-chedcking Raquel Welch. If you're into GMILF, I'd prefer Germaine Greer myself. She's funny, articulate, and has researched the sexual practices of a lot of societies that go around with very few clothes. Off-topic yes.
Having a job is not important. Survival and living a happy life is. If you have enough money to survive and live a happy life, you don't need a job. If you can survive and live a happy life without money, then you don't need money.
Do you think a person's life is defined by the work he or she does? Does work equal life?
Let the robots do the boring jobs. Let humans come up with things the robots can't do.
I know a few people who could use attitude stability with redundancy.
I had a game in my Spectrum called "gyroscope"... thought it was a sci-fi word, though. I want a gyroscope fro Xmas!!!
that the Gyroscopes (and their circuit breakers) are part of a Self-Contained unit of the Space Station, the Z1 Integrated Truss Structure, which wasn't added to the station until it had been up there for almost 2 years.
Zarya was launced in November 1998.Unity was attached by Shuttle Endeavour in December 1998.
Zvezda docked to the station on July 25th, 2000.
The Z1 Truss was installed by Shuttle Discovery in October 2000.
The Gyroscopes which are an integral part of the Z1 Truss weren't activated until assmebly mission 5A in February 2001.
Mostly because they're integrated in the Z1 Truss Structure on the outside of the station, where it's easier to swap them out with a space shuttle and the robot arm. They're big, they have a lot of mass, they're not the sort of thing you want astronauts to be shoving around inside (where you could smash something important with them) without the help of something like the robotic arms. Putting them somewhere the Crew could reach without a space walk, would mean that they've have to put them inside the station, and they're big (there are four of them), and that's a lot of habitable volume to lose.
Maybe it's way too early in the morning for me to post (too much blood in my caffeine system), but you brought up comma placement. Wouldn't your last sentence make more sense if the comma after "...run-on sentence" was moved to follow "...comma placement"?
;-)
i.e. "I'm not the type of person who usually points these types of things out, but after the first few sentences of atrocious grammar, the remainder of attrocious grammar is all packed into a run-on sentence that, depending upon proper comma placement, is incomplete.
Oh, and misspelling "atrocious" doesn't help the cause. Keep fighting the good fight, though!
Corruptissima re publica plurimae leges.
Just as a technical note, the shuttle doesnt supply the station with propellant for the thruster driven attitude control system. That propellant actually comes from the Russian Progress resupply vehicles. So prop resupply and shuttle flights are unrelated.
Random-ISS-Flight-Controller-Type-Guy
For the reasons mentioned above they wanted to minimize the risk of an electrical fire on board the ISS. I used to work at Lockheed Martin as a programmer on the ISS - ECLSS (Environmental Control and Life Support System) software. Our software could simulate de-pressurization and pressurization of all the modules on the ISS as well as electrical loads and fires. I can assure you after the mishaps that Mir encountered they thought through the design carefully. The gyros and all power sources are all possible fire ignition triggers on-board a closed module full of O2.
> Wosh = Sound of joke flying right over your head.
Liar! In space, noone can hear you missing the joke.
Virg
Probably the same guy who designed Louis Wu's ship the Lying Bastard. That ship, as I recall, crashed into the Ringworld.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."