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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.
Why didn't they just reverse the polarity on the shields? Do I have to think of everything myself?
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
can't run the shields and the transporter at the same time.....
deflector dish must've been tied up by those assholes in stellar cartography.....
they're always tyin that MFin deflector dish up.....
I'd bittorrent that.
Fixed that for you
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
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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Yeah, a hockey stick would work much better.
Gee, imagine if every time something was a teensy bit difficult we didn't even try..
According to an article I just read*, that piece of junk was estimated to be about five inches in diameter and traveling at a relative velocity (to the ISS) of about 22,000 mph. That's almost ten kilometers a second**.
If that had hit the Soyuz, it would have went in one side and out the other likely without even slowing down much, vaporizing a significant chunk of the hull - think white-hot metal shrapnel and shredded astronauts.
Look at what happens to an armored tank when a depleted uranium shell hits it at a much slower velocity. At the velocities we're talking about here, even a pebble can cause a lot of destruction; a five inch piece of debris likely weighing at least a kg has an effect like a large artillery shell. Remember the flake of paint that put an inch diameter pit into the shuttle's windshield all those years ago?
The only effective armor against something like this is a meter or so of rock.
* http://www.usatoday.com/tech/science/space/2009-03-12-space-station_N.htm
**Google: 22000 mph in meters per second = 9834.88 meters per second.
SB
It's old. The more humans I meet, the more I like my cats. At least they are honest.
No, I'm home sick today.
I drank what? -- Socrates
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.