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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?
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.
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.
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.
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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What if you used an ion drive and a fuel system for quick maneuvering. Maybe soemthing that can dock with the Space Station for refueling?
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
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
Harder than you'd think. To deorbit a fragment like this you need to:
So that's three major orbital manoeuvres, per fragment. And that sort of stuff is really expensive: in order to move from a circular orbit around the equator to a circular orbit around the pole, you need twice the delta-V that you used to get into orbit in the first place!
So it would probably be cheaper to use a single disposable vehicle that you launch to a specific debris cloud, and then it collects as much crap as it can and then deorbits. But even that's going to be a major project --- and much of the debris up there right now is on the order of paint flecks, which are damn hard to pick up (or even find).
So this sort of thing isn't nearly as simple as it first sounds...
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.
So that's three major orbital manoeuvres, per fragment.
You make it too complicated. You don't have to pick up the fragment, move yourself, then drop the fragment. You just have to exchange velocity with the fragment during a very brief interaction, flinging you every-so-slightly outside your orbit,and flinging it every-so-slightly inside it's orbit. Gravity takes care of the rest.
much of the debris up there right now is on the order of paint flecks, which are damn hard to pick up (or even find).
Again, too complicated. What you need is something large, light weight, and sticky. A simple cylinder filled with an aero-gel just needs to fly through the debris cloud, letting the pieces impact the gel and get stuck there. The added mass, plus decreased speed, would automatically deorbit the collector.
http://www.mhall119.com
You make it too complicated. You don't have to pick up the fragment, move yourself, then drop the fragment. You just have to exchange velocity with the fragment during a very brief interaction, flinging you every-so-slightly outside your orbit,and flinging it every-so-slightly inside it's orbit. Gravity takes care of the rest.
Unfortunately all gravity is going to take care off is steering both objects around the earth in perfectly normal orbits. Remember, there's no such thing as an unstable orbit (excluding certain complicated interactions with other bodies) --- all orbits are stable unless they hit something (like the atmosphere). Any debris low enough to be easy to deorbit is most likely going to do so soon of its own accord anyway. To deorbit the rest, you're going to have to change its velocity by a lot. Otherwise you achieved nothing.
The only way of changing the velocity of such an object is either rapidly, which means a collision, or slowly, which means your vehicle's going to have to grab the target object and do an engine burn. A collision is going to produce secondary debris, and will most likely kill your vehicle. Grabbing the object is a horribly complex engineering problem.
Again, too complicated. What you need is something large, light weight, and sticky. A simple cylinder filled with an aero-gel just needs to fly through the debris cloud, letting the pieces impact the gel and get stuck there. The added mass, plus decreased speed, would automatically deorbit the collector.
No, not really --- if you're going slowly enough to let the particles stick, rather than just vaporise (causing secondary debris), you're not going to transfer enough momentum to do anything useful. Attaching your aerogel to a vehicle which you can use to deorbit the whole lot might be potentially useful, though, but you'll still need a hell of a lot of it. Debris clouds are huge. China's 2007 antisatellite test filled everything on a particular orbital plane from about 200km up to about 4000km up.
What's more, aerogel's only good against stuff small enough and light enough to capture --- that debris cloud contains an estimated 35,000 objects bigger than 1cm. These are likely to punch straight through your aerogel, causing yet more secondary debris...
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.