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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.
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.
The station's computer is still complaining of an ongoing fault in the AE-35 unit.
Inertia. Gyros work for the same reason that it's not easy to push a stopped car. It takes a lot of energy to make an object change its rate of motion.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
Maybe this will help? I can't really think of a simple way to explain it. They're a lot of fun to play with, though. :)
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.
Keeping
"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!
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.
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!
"attitude stability with redundancy"
Wish my ex-gf had that =/
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."
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.
I'll try.
:-)
Gyro is short for gyroscope. Did you ever play with a top as a child? Hopefully, at least once. Conceptually, a gyro is like a top; it is spun up very fast (thousands of RPM, typically), gaining a lot of angular momentum (sorry). Part of the gyro is fixed in the housing in which it resides; the rest is free to move around, typically in two axes, just like a top leans to and fro a little as it moves across a surface. The housing is mounted to the spacecraft in an orientation that aligns the gyro in a known way. When the spacecraft's attitude, or orientation, changes, the housing moves with it BUT the gyro "top" remains fixed inertially, i.e., with respect to things outside the spacecraft. Remember Newton's first law of motion? Paraphrasing, an object in motion stays in motion, maintaining it's orientation, unless something acts on it. The gyro is free to move in the housing, so its orientation remains fixed (inertially) even though the housing its in moves around it.
Anyway, electronics in the inertial reference unit, the overall package of which the gyro is a part, sense the change in orientation of the gyro with respect to the housing and convert this into rotations about the axes the gyro is aligned with. Actually, IRUs typically put out accelerations, which must be integrated to produce rotations, but the idea is the same.
Hopefully, that helped a bit.
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.
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.