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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."
It starts with a piece of trash and quickly turns into a terrible neighborhood. Next thing you know, it'll be the International Space Crackhouse.
I told you we shouldn't have let those Russians in.
What about installing a device to eject garbage in the direction of the earth, so that they will be burned in the atmosphere as this would also help the ISS to maintain altitude. I realize that the effect would be minimal, but yet all small things might help. Anyway ejecting materials towards is always better than just let them float away.
... after all, one man's trash is another man's treasure (if you believe that saying). I know of a number of people who would pay what I consider to be a fair sum of money just to own something that had been _in space_.
Joking aside, how hard would it be to double-bag a few trash bags and keep the trash outside until a convenient "recovery" mission could come around?
Exactly, there is no reason not to incinerate their trash. I can't believe this is 2006, people have been going into space for more than 40 years now, and they still are throwing trash overboard even though they know the danger. Stupid, stupid, stupid.
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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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They could pack their trash and, with minimal thrust, send it on a quick reentry path in which it will burn in higher atmosphere a few days or weeks later.
Yeah, because see, all these rocket scientists, they are well known for bein' stoopid. Ain't that a shame to pollute them purty stars.
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If all you needed to deorbit something thrown from the ISS was a "small amount of thrust", don't you think that atmospheric drag would have already deorbitted the ISS itself?
In order to deorbit something, you need a very considerable amount of thrust, with an engine and propellant brought up from Earth at enormous cost. Left to its own device, a low-density object such as a bag of trash is going to slowly lose altitude due to atmospheric drag, then burn. No need for propellants. Good old air envelope does the trick.
As for reusing it, I'm afraid that a sizeable fraction of the trash is, er, astronaut dung. I doubt the reuse value of human waste is very high in space, until we have complete hydroponic gardens.
there is no reason not to incinerate their trash.
Incinerate? Whaaa?? Look, this is space, ok? Having a simple combustion chamber working in space would be a major, major physics achievement. There is no convection, so flames don't behave as expected. There are whole experiments studying a simple candle flame in space.
Never mind the fact that you'd need oxygen and fuel, brought from Earth at enormous cost, to burn wet waste.
The only way to incinerate things in space practically would be with a electric plasma arc, which in turn would requires a really large energy input. So until the ISS flies several isotope generators, there will be no such thing.
Remember, these decisions are made by people who actually know what's going on. The only problem is that they obviously don't communicate their reasons, since Slashdot readers -- Slashdot readers! -- feel compelled to call them stupid.
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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, no. If an astronaut were to throw a bag of trash 'downwards' towards the Earth then its orbital velocity relative to the space station would increase (since it is moving into a lower orbit) so it would start to overtake the space station below it. As the orbital velocity increases it would start to again climb to a higher orbit, passing above the space station in front of it. As it gained a higher orbit than the space station its orbital velocity relative to the ISS would drop, causing the trash to drop to a lower orbit. In summary, if you throw anything out of the ISS down towards the Earth it will in fact pull a complete loop and end up impacting the top of the ISS.
There is only one safe direction to throw anything out of an orbiting spacecraft - backwards, in the opposite direction of your orbit. By doing this you reduce the orbital velocity of the object relative to your spacecraft thereby guaranteeing that the object will enter a lower orbit from which it is guaranteed not to climb. At this point atmospheric drag will continue to degrade the objects orbit until it eventually burns up.
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