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Dropped Shuttle Toolbag Filmed From Earth
cathector writes "An article at spaceweather.com reports that the toolbag dropped during Heidemarie Stefanyshyn-Piper's spacewalk has been recorded on film from earth: 'When Endeavour astronaut Heidemarie Stefanyshyn-Piper dropped her toolbag during a spacewalk on Nov. 18th and it floated away, mission controllers probably figured they'd seen the last of it. Think again. Last night, Nov. 22nd, veteran satellite observer Kevin Fetter video-recorded the backpack-sized bag gliding over his backyard observatory in Brockville, Ontario. "It was easily 8th magnitude or brighter as it passed by the 4th magnitude star eta Pisces," he says. Spaceweather's satellite tracker is monitoring the toolbag.'"
The actual loss of the bag was filmed, too; reader Kagura links in a comment on the original story to this YouTube clip of the bag's escape.
That's a tool bag!
could it possibly have been that really bright thing that passed over yesterday (or maybe the day before)?
Those of us who think they know everything annoy those of us who do.
Scotty will use it in the future to fix the Enterprise. Good stuff.
And I can't even find a single Phillips screwdriver in my own closet!
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WTF
Chuck
Exactly what I said as I dropped a bolt today and it rolled away under the car. :-)
I suppose something of this incident will go down in history and become the origin of some common expression like Murphy's Law in the distant future. Maybe feature in a future episode of Star Trek?
hey all you engineers. yeah I know you're reading this. yeah I have no idea what the acronym could be but what it does is simple... what sort of energy, processing, and weight requirements are needed to build a little ball of a robot. to detach, fly by, and return, any tool sized object an astronaut may let go of. this shouldn't be that hard. a lot of you guys are smarter than me. I'm sure you can spend a little time writing the equations up here. lets get something going. and if anyone actually gets off their ass and makes something happen, we might even get paid.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x6QUPZKBRt0
I'm pretty sure I saw an extremely dim object floating behind the station with binoculars on the 20th. My first suspicion was that it was the bag.
It's a bird! It's a plane! No .. wait it's a tool bag.
I don't mean to be pedantic but those of clips look more like video than film. I realize I lot of kids these days don't know the difference...
So does that mean if an astronaut got disconnected and floated off, we'd be able to see them orbiting or flying off too? Kind of morbid.
Reviewing just the first hour of video games.
That is awesome!
NASA funniest home videos?
Seriously though, I feel sorry for this woman. One minor slip up and because the media latched onto it this is all she'll ever be remembered for. NASA astronauts risk life and limb and while the humour's good we shouldn't forget the effort and sacrifice they make should not be dismissed lightly.
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at least there when you screw something down there you dont have the whole world watching you
How, exactly, do you *drop* something in space?
It's a very dark ride.
On top of the toolbag as it glides, sits Doolittle the Spider.
Simple: when the shuttle's done at the station, detach and intercept the bag in orbit. Voila, $100k saved. They could think of it as a drill for retrieving an astronaut who floats away during a spacewalk.
Let's hope those tools won't be an orbital hazard in the future.
"It probably would be cheaper just to have the astronauts make sure the bag is continually tethered to something."
Yeah, and it's a hell of a lot cheaper to just "not get sick or have any accidents" than to pay for health insurance.
Seriously, sh-t happens, as the saying goes. I really don't think it would be that hard to create some sort of little robot, like the person suggested, to fetch stuff. Heck, it doesn't have to even be a robot in the sense of being autonomous. It could just be an R/C device. You probably wouldn't even need any sort of combustion-based engine for the bot, just some sort of compressed gas (air, nitrogen, CO2) nozzles.
Let's put aside any blame, mistakes, whether the media is being unfair...for just a moment.
Seeing that bag just drift off, only a few feet away from the station and then a few days later we see it pass by in orbit from Earth is just amazing. I'm always impressed with whatever we do in space.
Was it my tax dollars that paid for that lost bag? Still worth the money.
I was watching some sort of NASA clip that showed a tool tray for on-orbit work. It locked the tools down until you plugged the lanyard from your suit into the tool, then the only way to get the lanyard off the tool was to lock it back into the tray..
Guess that wasn't in use this time.
http://spaceweather.com.nyud.net/swpod2008/23nov08/33442.wmv
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Tether your tool!
She fumbled, in a high-stress enviroment under high-stress circumstances, but it's not her fault. I actually instantly saw the flaw with something/somebody else when I read this the first time.
what in heavens name is up with a space grease gun leaking grease were it's not supposed to? Were does Nasa get these? At the local hardware store for 10 Dollars a piece or what? This stunt actually went quite well. Imagine her not being able to do her job (or get back to the airlock) because a grease gun explodes all over her helmet visor or something simular.
Say what you want, but somewhere some Nasa engineering team has to get back to the drawing table ASAP and design a greasegun that actually works relyably - Nasa style wise. Or something simular with no moving parts at all. Maybe get a vaseline can and a spatula tied to a string or something - that's probably how the russians do it.
I'd actually be super-pissed at gear that goes haywire on me 7 hours into a stressy EVA. I do climbing - imagine your backback shedding mission-critical gear at 300 meters in the vertical or something simular. Multipling that by a thousand hints the scale of issues we're talking about.
Way more people than just the astronaut are responsible here.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
I think even home depot quality rope, cable or chain would have been sufficient for a toolbag tether.
What's that thing falling from th
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One of the Apollo astronauts once remarked that what they really think about is "Please let me not fuck up.".
made it a $100,000 tool bag as reported by the BBC?
who never screw up, are those people who never DO ANYTHING. The broad dropped some tools. The only thing a couch potato, or an armchair warrior has ever dropped was their arse, or a potato chip. Tools are replaceable - sooner or later. This time, maybe $100,000 later.........
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It's not that morbid, though it probably would give a spacewalker a bit of a scare. But in the event that they lose both tethers and float off, they also have the SAFER packs to get them back.
Well, since Bush produced some new weapon funding for space, I'm sure its fun being an astronaut wondering if someone just was intentionally ejected into space like a ... lost grease gun POP
The statement "Lord, please don't let me fuck this up" was originally referred to as "The Shepard's Prayer", after the first US astronaut, Alan Shepard. He reportedly "recited" it while on the pad awaiting his Mercury flight, not knowing that his mike was hot, and everyone in launch control was listening in.
Shepard also ended up having to pee in his spacesuit on the pad, because the engineers hadn't considered the effects of having a man lying on his back with his legs elevated for several hours before launch.
The glory days of manned spaceflight...:)
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If space baggies are the problem, Quark is the solution.
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He's better than that pigfucking actor who plays "Scotty." James Trafficant stands up in the House and says it to those non-resident aliens in their face whenever they pork Americans in the a$$: "Beam. Me. Up." Look it up on Youtube. The guy is legend.
It's not that hard for a woman astronaught to stop insulting us menfolk. In a job where you should be yourself, those womens should stop trying to mock us men losing our tools and stuff. Why didn't she just attach a 10' rope and swing around to pick it up or did she want to stop mocking how us men solve our tool-losing powers? Even Indiana Jones' loudmouth ladyfriend throughout the first couple movies could do that. But no, she's gotta be all subliminal anti-man, even so much as giving us the idea that she said "damn broke a nail" just as she remembered she deep9'red the toolbag.
If they want to slap some of us men around any more, why didn't they just admit they lost the tools somewhere in the shuttle like they said they lost the spiders. Nobody cared, but instead they gotta mock us menfolk with the sublminal message that she farked-up because us men are the one's in control of the mission. Sure, us men should've put a better tool-stowing strategy when in the open bay and spacewalking all over the work. I can talk for days on this subject, but I think I'll let an hundred man-hours of Slashdot posts within the next 30 minutes resolve this sexist anti-man hype being put here by the likes of the 4chan crows.
Another opportunity for a publicity stunt by Taco Bell when this thing falls out of orbit?
Just tell the Chinese that the bag really contains our new secret death ray. I'm sure they'll find a way to "deal with it."
I don't recall seeing this figure, but maybe someone has seen it.... When will the toolbag enter the atmosphere? Months? Days? Years?
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Nobody cares that it's a wmv file?
Too bag it was a tool bad.
Astronaut loses spatula while testing heat shield tile repair process.
Since when it is a sacrifice to perform your dream job?
The sacrifice may be to give up some things in order to do it, but most likely are negligible compared with the satisfactions and even risks (people do many risky things for far less rewards).
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
while everyone seems to think this is funny or cool, it's actually a very real problem: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_debris , and http://www.space.com/spacewatch/space_junk.html Why has none of this stuff plummeted out of orbit and plonked someone on the head?
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it shouldn't be too difficult to narrow it down to which Heidemarie Stefanyshyn-Piper lost it - if she had the good sense to put her name on it.
Genesis 1:32 And God typed
Maybe it's just me, but I would expect a spacewalk to be performed by a strict procedure, (someone telling each step over the intercom or a digital checklist attached to the sleeve of the astronaut's suit), comparable to how surgeons work: well planned and prepared, the placement of the toolbox and its tools included in the planning (open attached toolbag, attach needed tool to suit, detach said tool from toolbag (with double straps, like mountain climbers do), use tool, etc.). Am I getting something fundamentally wrong about spacewalking as to how this would be impossible?
And what if there's nothing behind the door until it is being opened?
How do we know the thing in the wmv was, in fact, the tool bag? I assume it's tracked or something (based on known orbit/velocity/somethingelseaboutwhichIknownothing)? I.e. we know it should have been there, then? And lo, something was there, then, so that was it?
Before you design for reuse, make sure to design it for use.
Well I guess the head of Nasa doesn't get docked for each satellite thats blow up on the launch pad/ disappears into space on the wrong trajectory etc so I don't think the crew will get docked for dropping a tool bag... ... and let's not get into what bankers and politicians should be docked from their salaries for all the money that's disappeared out of the national economies right now!
I think this sort of incident around the ISS could drive the development of a simple space ROV for picking up these sorts of things, or serving as a camera platform for observing docking/separations etc. It wont be the last time this happens, and I guess that generally they will be relatively low velocity.
"You don't actually think they spend $20,000.00 on a hammer, $30,000.00 on a toilet seat do you?" - Julius Levinson
New career choice: Virus Writer!
Of course, any virus written by the U.S. Government goes into the public domain.
I guess a compressed gas powered pistol that shoots a tethered grapple or net device is just too science fiction?
How the frick would they get an astronaut back?
Take your 7 number UIDs and get off my lawn :p
(/patiently waits for someone with a lower UID to give me the business)
Seriously, why don't astronauts carry batman-esqe grappling hooks that they can instantly grab and use for situations like this, or even getting knocked off the platform with a failed suit pack? Obviously not just a spearhead hook, maybe a tethering end to wrap around the target. Reusable.
Aren't there think-tanks to address these kind of scenarios?
We saw it already in earlier news. Thanks to NASA for not warning us!
How is it that these people can keep making these awful petty comments?
These astronauts are out in about the most lethal environment a person can be in, a rather nasty death waiting on the other side of their suit, potential radiation, floating in 0 G with the difficulty in doing anything inherent in that along with the risk of floating off (SAFER or no backpack), and any time you look down a nice big reminder of just how far you're going to fall.
Crap happens, things have happened before, they'll happen again.
I applaud you and pray that Doolittle baloons safely through the troposphere jetstreams to a certain veterinarian in an unusual niggardly San Francisco houshold.
cuz you're never late for US'ian national Butt-Pirate Day. Edward Scissorhands was a lame movie if it weren't for my imagination of a goth Wynona Ryder pinching her pink frosty nipplettes at my general direction while urinating from the top of a frozen water-slide.
ohhhh-ho ho ho ho. I'm coming to Pepperbees's for all my satisfaction(s).
Sounds trivial now, but imagine how much of a bummer it would be if you're cruisin' along minding your own business when all of the sudden... WHAM! Hammer, right through ythe hull of your spacecraft.