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Astronauts Throw Trash Into Space
MattSparkes writes "The International Space Station is home to an increasing amount of unwanted goods, and NASA has just approved a policy where these could be thrown out of the door into space. 'Tools and other gear have accidentally floated away during spacewalks. But NASA has shied away from intentionally jettisoning gear off the ISS in the past because of the threat of space junk hitting the station or other spacecraft.' The loosening of the rules on this comes just as Russian cosmonaut Mikhail Tyurin is about to take a space walk where he will hit a golf ball from the ISS in a promotional stunt for a golf company."
while reading your post, the fortune cooky just above was "Sodd's Second Law: Sooner or later, the worst possible set of circumstances is bound to occur.", right on topic, I would say.
Quite apart from the obvious dangers involved in dumping trash into orbit ...
ISS trash isn't actually trash --- it's extremely valuable material (and mass) that has been boosted into LEO at very high cost.
They should attach an extensible trash module to the ISS, and place all their "trash" (which simply means stuff that they cannot currently use) into the containers through appropriate hatches.
(And I bet space contractors would love to bid for such a project too.)
Not only would you reduce the risk to future flights this way, but you would also provide useful materials for the future. *AND* you'd be seen to be environmentally sensitive, which is no bad thing.
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Pigs. Litterbugs. Someone ought to fine them $500. What can you say?
But... after all... one of the pivotal episodes in Arthur C. Clarke's 1952 novel "Islands in the Sky" concerns an orbital spacecraft which is alarmed by the presence of a large, unidentified spacecraft, approach closely enough to identify it, and sees that it's covered in radiation symbols. In the novel, it turns out that the AEC had, at one time, had the bright idea of disposing of radioactive waste by shooting it into space, and this is a stray canister of high-level radioactive waste. So I guess it could be worse.
And "throwing away" (such an aptly descriptive phrase: just toss the waste a discrete distance from the dwelling) seems to be a basic part of human nature. In Owen Wister's novel, "The Virginian," set in Wyoming between 1874 and 1890, the narrator and his companions partake of "Sardines... and potted chicken, and devilled ham," and muses:
"But portable ready-made food plays of necessity a great part in the opening of a new country. These picnic pots and cans were the first of her trophies that Civilization dropped upon Wyoming's virgin soil. The cow-boy is now gone to worlds invisible; the wind has blown away the white ashes of his camp-fires; but the empty sardine box lies rusting over the face of the Western earth."
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Having an astronaut literally throw a typical size bag of trash toward the Earth would be sufficient acceleration (or deceleration depending on your point of view) to cause it to burn up within a couple weeks. And better yet it would instantly be in a non-intersecting orbit with the ISS.
In the past they haven't done this because it will cause the ISS to be accelerated into a higher orbit. The difference would be minimal, but certainly measurable. The ISS is not very well equipped to deal with such problems (remember that it is technically falling all the time normally). Apparently NASA has decided that this effect is minimal enough that it would not be detrimental to the ISS orbit.
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Actually, all you need is a ribbon.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Wait a minute. What you are saying seems to defy common sense.
Yup, orbital mechanics will do that. It starts with "if you want to go faster, slow down" and just gets weirder from there.
In space, if you throw an object, it will continue in that direction until resistance is met.
Only if its orbital velocity is negligable compared to the velocity you throw it at; otherwise it's direction will change constantly under the influence of gravity.
So, if the space station is 220 to 250 miles out in orbit and you throw or eject a package of trash toward the earth at 20 miles per hour (that seems reasonably simple). The package would travel 220 to 250 miles in 11 to 12.5 hours. It would be incinerated well before that. Am I missing something? Is there some principle of physics that would cause it's descent to slow as it's orbit decreased? It seems to me, that it would speed up if anything.
If you throw your trash toward the Earth at 20 miles per hour, the trash won't be moving at 20 miles per hour, it will still be moving at approximately 11,000 miles per hour; its velocity will just have changed direction by about a tenth of a degree. Its new orbit will now be slightly elliptical, but it still won't be elliptical enough to intersect thick atmosphere.
You're right that the trash will speed up as it gets closer to Earth... and as it speeds up, the centrifugal force required to keep it moving closer to Earth increases, gravity can't keep up, and the trash moves outwards again.