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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!
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!
Read my Very Short "Stories"
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?
Timestamp 1: Witnesses as far as 720 kilometers apart reported seeing what looked like a bright meteor falling somewhere on the Saskatchewan-Alberta boundary around 5:30 pm MT Thursday, according to the CBC.
Timestamp 2: Last night, Nov. 22nd, veteran satellite observer Kevin Fetter video-recorded the backpack-sized bag gliding over his backyard observatory in Brockville, Ontario.
So, no.
Supposedly secure equipment has been lost during EVA since the Gemini program. Mike Collins lost a camera which jiggled out of a mount on his pressure suit. Its very hard to avoid this kind of problem.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x6QUPZKBRt0
It probably would be cheaper just to have the astronauts make sure the bag is continually tethered to something.
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.
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
Because of GMm/R^2
Have no fear, language has this wonderful ability to evolve giving words new meaning. Definitions of words are not set in stone.
On top of the toolbag as it glides, sits Doolittle the Spider.
timestamp 3: ???
timestamp 4: profit!
Those of us who think they know everything annoy those of us who do.
Bad Astronomy posted an entry devoted to refuting this idea! As Phil Plait says, the very fact that the toolkit has just been sighted shows that it's still up there, and could not have been the fireball.
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.
Simple: when the shuttle's done at the station, detach and intercept the bag in orbit. Voila, $100k saved.
Not a chance. That bag doesn't just float somewhere around the station, it is on an orbital trajectory of its own -
by now probably quite far from the ISS in fact. And unless Heidemarie aimed very carefully, it isn't even in the same
orbital plane. The shuttle doesn't carry enough fuel to do plane transfer maneuvers (that's the main reason why timing is important when launching), and even if it did, it would take a hell of a lot of maneuvering to do a full orbital
realignment - which would probably cost more in fuel alone than those $100k.
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).
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
One of the Apollo astronauts once remarked that what they really think about is "Please let me not fuck up.".
Incorrect. Had she not imparted momentum to it by shoving it aside, it would have stayed right there and not moved, at least in any time frame likely to be relevant to the ISS personnel.
I hate printers.
Your first mistake was reading the comments on a Youtube video.
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.
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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Yeah, that's the problem at our house. Our FETCH unit digs up the garden, craps on the neighbor's lawn, pisses off their cat, chases squirrels, knocks up the poodle down the street.
The shuttle crew will need to deploy the rolled up newspaper from time to time.
Have gnu, will travel.
Dangit fine. I tried to resist, but there wasn't enough time left on the countdown.
All comments are properties and trademarks of the voices in my head. Not like I'm gonna claim them.
I think you are wrong.
I know I'm not. I've calculated stuff like this before.
The velocity relative to the ISS is a few metres per second at the most.
You'd be surprised how difficult it is to catch up even in those orders of magnitude.
Orbital maneuvering is hard, and very unintutive. NASA had to learn this the hard way:
The early rendez-vous missions assumed it would be possible to fly manual visual approaches once the
target is in sight. Didn't work. Maneuvering out-of-plane is also energetically very expensive.
Because it got a single impulse it will keep coming back once an orbit.
True, the orbits intersect in space. But not in time, due to different excentricity.
The shuttle/ISS will not be at the section point the next time the bag comes along.
I don't think catching it with the shuttle on this mission is impossible.
If the orbital periods have a common integer multiple (unlikely), they could wait and try a very risky
catch-the-bag EVA (exactly one chance) - but they will probably run out of time, air and other
supplies before this would be possible even then.
Just accept it: It's impossible.
Actually, the brightest star in the sky (aside from sol/the sun) is Sirius, which has a negative magnitude at -1.42.
i'd say you must be new here, but you probably wouldn't get that either
Those of us who think they know everything annoy those of us who do.