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Satellite Debris Forces ISS Crew Into Rescue Craft
Muad'Dave writes "CNN is reporting that the crew of the International Space Station was forced to take refuge from a possible collision of the ISS with a piece of space debris Thursday. From the article: 'Floating debris from a satellite forced the crew of the international space station to retreat to a safety capsule Thursday, according to a NASA news release. .. The debris was too close for the space station to move out of the way, so the station's three crew members were temporarily evacuated to a the station's Soyuz TMA-13 capsule, NASA said.'" Update: 03/12 18:42 GMT by T : The original story incorrectly said the ISS had 18 crew members. Luckily for the three in the Soyuz, that was a mistake.
This is just another reason to invest in laser defenses. Preferably sharks with fricken' lasers on their heads.
I swear, that Soyuz module will never die, considering how old it is.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
18 crew memebers? Are they shooting a Girls Gone Wild video up there or something?
... or Expedition 18?
18 crew members? What, are they having some kind of party up there? Did somebody drop in unannounced?
The gift of death metal does not smile on the good looking.
Umm...since when does the ISS have 18 crew members? Last I'd heard it was 3 and going to be doubled to 6 in the next few months.
There are 3 individuals on board: 2 Americans and 1 Russian.
The current expedition is Expedition 18. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expedition_18 . This likely got garbled at some point from something like "Expedition 18 Crew" to "18 crew."
Timothy strikes again!
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
WTF? Are they hauling them back from Jupiter now?
If you don't know what AltaVista is (was), get off my lawn.
I was just imagining the 'clown car' version of the Soyuz.
The gift of death metal does not smile on the good looking.
Bigot! Someday we will rise up against our . . . uh, oh, never mind. Human here. Not an escaped replicant.
.... slashdope editors were hit in the head with falling space debris today, further complicating their inability to detect sloppy facts.
This has not impacted their availability and readers are cautioned to continue questioning anything masquerading as fact.
Now is the time for private investors to step forward with solutions. For example a small craft to grab and safely drop items (lower their speeds at the right time ) could take down items that are 30 CM and bigger. Perhaps, system for taking down whole sats. Keep in mind that working sats have to maneuver around them, which is a lose in energy. No doubt countries or even insurance companies would pay for this.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
What would be ironic is if the space junk hit the Soyuz capsule when they were in it. Probably not the best strategy to put all the eggs in one basket in that case.
120 characters isn't enough to explain it.
Yap. They really need to build that big laser/water cannon to blast this stuff out of orbit. I heard there's all kinds of nonsense floating around up there. Office chairs from Washington State among other things.
At some point all those agencies (government and private) who have put that junk up there are going to have to get together and find a solution. That includes all the private sat operators who have left stuff up there as well as the national space agencies.
At the moment everyone seems to be saying, "well, it's not *all* my mess, so I'm not cleaning it up". At some point this is going to start impacting (literally) everyone involved with space. We've already lost a few satellites, how many more do we need to lose before people get off their arses and find a proper solution.
You could probably work out the approximate proportions of the total problem were caused by each agency/company, so divide the bill up accordingly.
Of course, anyone who has watched engineers divide up the bill in a restaurant will know that probably isn't as easy as it sounds...
Paul Leader
Here's a picture of a PAM-D motor.
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
Who is to blame as this happens more often? Is there going to be a tracking mechanism that shows exactly whose debris causes damage to a craft?
It seems to me that if countries are going to be so irresponsible as to not decommission their craft and satellites correctly they ought to either clean it up or pay a very hefty fine to reimburse the loss of a country's hard-earned space mission.
For instance, if China treats space the way they treat many other things (ie little or no regard for its preservation, pardon the sweeping statement) then what recourse will other countries have? If they have a project which has cost a nation billions of dollars and a small piece of shrapnel knocks out the whole damn thing, what happens next?
I'm sure someone will get paid big bucks to make a solution, but it sure sounds like space debris is quickly becoming a problem. Maybe it's just coincidence, though.
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The debris wasn't from a smashed satellite, either from collision with another or blasted by a missile. It was their own trash, "a piece of a satellite rocket motor left behind by an earlier space shuttle mission". The chances of something from an entirely different orbit impacting a craft are still infinitesimal. To quote the philosopher Adams "Space is big. Really big. You wouldn't believe how mind-boggling big it is." Compare to broken junk floating around even near Earth orbit is that big.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
I canno' change the laws o' slashdot... I mean, physics!
Free Martian Whores!
...so let's do it right the first few times:
1. Send up a net to catch the big stuff. The size of the net and opening determines how many nets we send up. throw the net at Earth. Stuff burns up. The final net will probably more like mesh. On to step 2.
2. Send up a disk of Aerogel. We did this on a smaller scale to capture comet debris. We don't need to get this one back, it can burn up when we throw this at Earth also. But if it doesn't burn, just aim it at the Pacific. Or Russia, some if it is their stuff after all. I live to close to the Iridium home, so that's out of the question, right?
3. Mop up the remainder with variations on the theme.
4. Profit!
We're gonna have to do it. Let's do it right. And we will learn a lot about LEO maneuvering, targeting, robotics in space, etc. We can let the Chinese or the Russians, or the Japanese join in, maybe even Canada or India, some nations that wanna learn space stuff. And we could probably get some commercial outfit to bid on it.
This is a tremendous opportunity, actually. A few $B should cover it. We spend that every week on landfills. Let's just do it.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
Trouble with that idea is that it'll only detect objects in almost exactly the same orbit as the ISS. And if they are in the same orbit, their velocities will be almost identical (Kepler's third law, correct?), and so the object will probably never catch the ISS (and if it did, their relative velocities would be quite low).
From the differences in velocity mentioned in the space.com article, I'd guess that the debris is moving in a much more elliptical orbit than the ISS is. Makes it lots harder to detect.
NASA is working on it
rewriting history since 2109
Space junk and golf clubs they post no threat to us, cause if we find we're in a bind....
Too bad NASA is not as creative as Gene Roddenberry (or Voltaire)
The Astra Naughties. It ends with one clad only in a diaper... Oh, wait!
"No fear. No envy. No meanness." Liam Clancy
Form the USA Today story on this:
Space station crew has close call with space junk
Whoa! Dude, WTF?! Put that away or I'm telling Mission Control.
You mean some sort of Inter-Agency Space Debris Coordination Committee? They could meet every year to discuss topics and hand out assignments for the next year, and they could make reports to the UN, and stuff. Trouble is, no one else would ever know they existed.
Oh dear lord, that was beautiful...
Of course, now I need to clean off my monitor & dry out my keyboard...
But, damn it, that was funny .
=)P
Ok so here's an idea..
We have objects flying around near the ISS at miles per second speeds, right?
Why can't we utilize the kinetic energy of these objects?
Or create our own probes that orbit earth and convert the earth's gravitational energy into kinetic energy that can *somehow* be transmitted back to earth?
jus sayin
Slashdot - I went there to fix their grammar that they're so bad at.