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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."
.... 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.
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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Just say who ever pays the biggest portion gets to put weapons in space~
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
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...
The chances of something from an entirely different orbit impacting a craft are still infinitesimal.
Much more likely than infinitesimal. As someone else commented, this has already happened. You must not have been watching the news lately.
The odds are either identically zero if the orbits do not intersect, or are small but significant if they do intersect. Orbits are not static and basically are never perfect closed ellipses, so there is a fair amount of fuzziness about whether two close orbits do or do not intersect. And, of course, every pair of orbits (about the same primary) cross twice on opposite sides of the planet - the two questions to ask are 1) whether they cross at the same altitude, and 2) whether the two objects are at the crossing at the same time.
Since an object in LEO completes about 15 orbits per day and each orbit crosses ALL others twice per orbit, there are many opportunities daily for collision. Most close passes are quite distant. Even if the two objects are near the particular crossing point the altitude may differ. Do the math, however, and you will find that there are several passages of two large objects within a few kilometers every single day. The odds of an actual collision then just scale as the volumes of the spacecraft divided by the volume of a unit cube. Wait long enough and they are guaranteed to collide.
All else being equal, the odds are about even that two large objects (spacecraft sized or so) will collide once per decade. There are hundreds of such orbiting objects, of course, so the odds for a specific satellite are something like once per a few millennia - for a collision with a similarly sized object. The odds are correspondingly larger for a collision between a spacecraft and the much more numerous pieces of small orbital 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.