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Minor Leak Being Investigated Aboard the ISS
Josh Fink writes "Space.com is reporting that the International Space Station has a minor atmosphere leak. 'An inspection of a vestibule bridging the station's new Harmony connecting module and NASA's Destiny laboratory indicated a slight air leak of about three pounds (1.3 kilograms) per day ..A close-up inspection of the vestibule seal by the station's three-astronaut Expedition 16 crew using an ultrasonic leak detector found no trace of a leak on Wednesday, [NASA spokesperson Lynette Madison] said. Studies of the station's overall internal pressure also found no signs of decay, she added.' While this is yet another technical issue with the ISS, when will this end? I am all for the space program, but there have been some major issues lately."
KERMIt, a "Kit for External Repair of Module Impacts", is one of those simple systems being developed at Marshall Research to seal punctures in the ISS. It will enable crewmembers to seal punctures from outside damaged modules that have lost atmospheric pressure. Delivery of the kit is scheduled for next year. KERMIt is also useful for sealing leaking atmospheric seals as TFF article describes (more info here).
Sigs cause cancer.
That and we're doing it on the cheap. Even at the height of the Apollo program we were still spending less as a percentage of GDP on exploration than the Spanish had during Columbus's time or the Persians or Romans had during their time. Americans like to think of ourselves as explorers, but as a nation we really aren't really into funding exploration like many of our predecessors, we're a lot more like China, fairly isolationists with occasional small forays outside.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Seriously, the story of the space program is not "we did so well nothing went wrong" but, "when things went wrong we used our guts and brains and fixed them"
Examples:
Gemini 8 thruster stuck. Armstrong was able to regain control and return safely home.
Apollo 11 landing 1201 and 1202 program alarms. Programmers on the ground and flight engineers were able to rapidly determine that the alarms posed no threat and the landing continued to success.
Apollo 13. Catastrophic explosion disabled the service module. The astronauts returned home safely using the LEM as a lifeboat and some creative navigation.
Skylab launch: Ripped off a solar panel and part of the outer skin. Astronauts were able to rig a replacement screen to cool inside of the lab and open the other solar panel that was stuck partly open. Three expeditions extended the time in space records and recorded what was then the most detail solar observations ever.
STS-49: Multiple attempts to capture and return an Intelsat satellite failed, but a final attempt involving the shuttle commander flying directly to the satellite and it being hand-captured by 3 spacewalkers succeeded.
There are plenty more, including the recent working solving problems with stuck and torn solar panels.
Incidentally, these kinds of things are why I favor human spaceflight over robots for complex and difficult challenges.
I'm not not licking toads.
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
Your formulas are a good first approximation. However, since we are not dealing with a fluid here, they don't work very well (plus I think you mixed up your numerator/denominator somewhere in there).
Anyways, I am sorry for not being very clear in my previous post.
Here is the reasoning: number of molecules that escape depend on the opening area, the time, and the number of collisons. The collisions depend on the pressure, temperature, and the molecular mass only (the formula is p * sqrt(1/(2 k T m)) where P is pressure, k is Boltz. const., T is the abs temp in K, m is the molecular mass).
The final formula looks like:
M_lost=A * time * p * m * sqrt (1/(2 * k * T * m ))
finally, the two m's cancel and you get
M_lost=A * time * p * sqrt (m/(2 * k * T))
Now, M_lost is 1.3
p is 10^5
m is 29 (for air)
k is 8.3
T is 300
Obama likes poor people so much, he wants to make more of them.
It's too low as it is --- there's enough air resistance that it has to be reboosted at intervals to keep it in orbit. (It has to be that low because otherwise the shuttles can't get there. They have lousy range.) Lowering the orbit any further would be very dangerous.
As for spinning it (you did mean bola, right? Unless you were actually thinking of giant robotic tanks, which I will admit would be quite cool), not only is it not designed for that and would fall apart, but if you want gravity there's plenty on Earth, where it's quite cheap. One of the main purposes for getting into space is to get free fall.
I rather regret that Mir was destroyed for purely political reasons. If the ISS was built as a set of add-on modules to Mir, gradually superseding Mir's own modules as they began to break down, construction could have gone a lot faster. Even if the Mir modules stopped working completely, they'd still have considerable value as salvage.
I want a balloon. A ten or twenty metre inflatable habitat module, semitransparent hopefully, in which plants a grown. Inflatables and plastics are the future of spaceflight; look at the cool stuff that Bigelow Aerospace are doing. But even they are simply replicating existing modules using inflatables. It ought to be possible to use the new materials to radically change the way space stations are built. How about a 100m wide spherical envelope, full of air, with your space station built inside? Now, that would be cool, particularly once you have a decent amount of plant life in there...
I think you're confusing liquid and fluid. A fluid is a substance which is unable to resist any shear stress, and all gases exhibit this behavior. Also, your units seem to be off, if the molecular mass is dimensionless then you're missing a mass^.5 somewhere. If not then you need to account for moles and the fact that m= .029 kg/mol.