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Minor Damage Found On Space Shuttle
The BBC is reporting on minor damage to the space shuttle Atlantis revealed by a 10-hour inspection in orbit. On the shuttle's right side, near where the wing joins the body, inspection revealed a 21" (53cm) line of chips in the tiles that make up the vehicle's heat shield. "...more analysis by engineers would determine whether a 'focused inspection' was needed in that specific area. If so, astronauts would use sensors to determine the exact depth of the damage to the heat shield tiles. NASA has placed the space shuttle Endeavour on stand-by to rescue the crew of Atlantis if they are endangered." The crew couldn't shelter on the ISS in case of trouble, because their orbit is higher and on a different inclination.
Roger that.
FWIW, you can get a lot of mission info while it happens, even if you don't have satellite TV - http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/nasatv/index.html
Pathological kinda promises Path + Logical - but instead, you get stuck with pathetic.
i guess it's not just dropping to another altitude. it's about changing the orbital plane, for which they don't have enough fuel.
More info here: http://spaceflightnow.com/shuttle/sts125/090512fd2/index5.html
"And Scooter, also I've got some good news about the tile damage that we saw on the starboard chine area earlier today," astronaut Alan Poindexter radioed from mission control shortly after 8 p.m.
"Oh, I'm looking forward to that. Go ahead," replied shuttle commander Scott "Scooter" Altman.
"It turns out that a focussed inspection of that area on the starboard chine is not going to be required," Poindexter reported.
"All right, you've got some happy EVA campers on that," Altman said.
wot no sig
Just to expand on the other poster's comments - remember that something in orbit is falling. It isn't just a case of pointing in the right direction and giving it an impulse. You need to effectively lift it 350km - doing roughly the same amount of work you would need to lift something from ground level to 350km up. That's a lot of fuel.
[FUCK BETA]
It's been on the front page of CNN.com since the afternoon. Here's the story.
Searching "shuttle" on msnbc.com and foxnews.com shows that both of them are carrying the story too, though neither site has it "above the fold" right now.
So what makes you such an expert?
Nasa experts have looked into all of these issues and potential solutions.
A mere couple of hundred miles is not a problem (you do know how fast the shuttle flies don't you?) Orbital mechanics is the problem. The fuel required for the shuttle to change orbits would weigh too much for it to get off the ground in the first place.
The risks have been very carefully considered, with the mission ruled out of safety grounds for a long time. Yes, they are pushing the risks on this mission but having a back up shuttle on the pad ready to lift off in three days (you do know about this don't you?) mitigates some of the risks. That together with other changes they have made have kept the risks of a catastrophic failure below the limit set for every mission.
wot no sig
I read some article that said it was the latter -- putting it into a suicide path into the ocean.
See this AP article:
Not quite right.
The ISS is below hubble so to get to it you need to drop in height. As there is no friction in space, this change takes just as much fuel to lose potential energy as it does to gain it so it doesn't make much difference. The shuttle would also have to increase in speed a bit (from 7500m/s to 7700m/s) so energy would be required for this too. However, these two requirements are insignificant compared to the change in orbit inclination required. HSS is 28.5 degrees, ISS is 51.6 degrees. That will take a lot of fuel.
wot no sig
That would make for an exciting scene in a movie, but this guy points out at article:
http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1231115&cid=27935049
that implies it is quite a bit easier than that (the initiation can probably be done remotely, or on a timer).
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
Extra careful checks... The Columbia disaster was due to comparatively huge damages to the shuttle, and this time they even report "scratches". There's no reason to worry about this, and NASA won't even inspect it more closely.
In comparison, the foam that struck Columbia was the size of a briefcase of 1.2 pounds (0.54 kg) and hit the wing at 800 feet per second (240 m/s), causing a 6-10 inch (15-25 cm) diameter hole in a critical section allowing hot gases to enter the wing.
This scratch is in addition to the much lower severity, also not in such a critical section.
The latter. The photos and laser scans made of the chips have been made with an inspection boom which is now carried on the shuttle to make these inspections post Columbia.
Normally (again post Columbia) the shuttle does a back flip when arriving at the ISS so that dinks can be photographed by the ISS. On this trip, this obviously isn't possible.
Oh and past shuttle flights have had far far worse damage than this which is minor.
wot no sig
I think the best solution would be if Atlantis could be brought back by autopilot. If the damage is marginal (that is they THINK it might destroy the shuttle but are not sure) then bringing it back unmanned would give you the possibility (if the damage is survivable) of recouping your billion dollar plus investment.
Won't work. The landing spots are generally near the takeoff spots. The takeoff spots were located so if it blows up on takeoff, the parts rain down on the dolphins and whales. Unfortunately (?) when it comes in to land, it arrives from the opposite direction, and no one selected landing sites that are empty to the west. Unfortunately gets a ? mark because back in the 70s when the shuttle was going to do everything for everyone, everywhere, it was occasionally claimed it would be able to land on commercial runways... so if you're coming in a bit short, just land at colorado international airport. That, along with most of the vehicles abilities, was all cut during development to save money.
The astronauts may have lobbied to keep NASA from giving the shuttles the ability to land themselves (or via ground control) in an attempt to keep pilots from being made irrelevant. (Throwback to test-pilot days I guess).
Based on the faulty assumption that all pilots do is keep it straight and level and wait as patiently as the plane lands. The whole point of decades of training for airline pilots and astronauts is for them to fully understand each little bit of the A/C and how to work when it breaks. They know their vehicle like a kernel hacker knows his kernel.
So, say the exhaust temperature of one APU is fluctuating. If the computer could "do something" to fix it, it would. The humans job is to invent new ideas of troubleshooting and fixing. Flip that switch see what happens, try this maneuver. The stuff the Apollo 13 guys did is not amazing or unlikely or lucky, despite what the general public thinks, it is in fact exactly what they were supposed to do...
Think of that Canadian pilot whom invented a way to put a jetliner in a slip to lose altitude to land at an abandoned military field when the plane ran out of gas because of metric/imperial issues.
Thats why you have humans onsite, in the loop.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
No, this begged the question "Has the reentry-vehicle-not-above-the-cryogenic-launch-vehicle configuration run its course". This was answered by the investigation into the 2003 Columbia accicdent, which concluded that the shuttle, the only vehicle to use this configuration, was flawed and experimental. It is vulnerable to the type of damage seen in STS-125, which is unnaceptable, so they are retiring the shuttles.
Rockets are fine, but the reentry vehicle must be above the rocket, because (a) the rocket is likely to throw off either frozen water or insulation at speeds that could damage the orbiter, and (b) you need to be able to pull away from the rocket at any time during launch in case of emergency.
Damn, I already moderated this topic. Now I'll have to log in with my sock puppet to comment.
Discovery was capable of automatic landing back in 2006 when they were still treading a fine line after Columbia. It appears it was a nasty hack at the time and would be manually plugged in if needed so it may not be included on current flights, but it was available.
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/06/30/0458246
Its worth reading up on just what sort of work is involved in these Hubble servicing missions. Heck, on the first one, Story Musgrave probably had to have nerves of steel. The Hubble was not really designed for on-orbit servicing, and the kind of tasks they had to do were things that would be hard enough on a workbench, let alone in a spacesuit. By the time you built a robotic vehicle that could do all the things a trained shuttle crew can, you might as well just build a new Hubble.
buy Powerball tickets, because those kinds of odds are nearly as good as winning
I wish that were true, but NASA's estimate on heat shield damage is 1 in 221. Two in a row are unlikely, but not unimaginable.
Thanks for that, Mr $0.02, that made me smile :-)
Daveime, no I'm not an expert but I do understand the laws of physics and have read up on this. Some of what you say is correct, but a lot isn't.
A small amount of fuel could be used to get the shuttle to visit the ISS. Unfortunately, this would be in a very elliptical orbit so they would only be able to (very) briefly wave through the window as they flew past each other at a very large differential speed before ploughing into the Earth in an unfortunately bright fireball.
To get to the same altitude as the ISS (keeping the orbit circular) requires dropping by 210km and speeding up by 200m/s. Not in itself a great requirement on fuel. The problem is that the orbit inclinations are so different (HST is 28.5 degrees, ISS is 51.6 degrees). To make this change requires something like a 3000m/s speed change sideways (this calc is only order of magnitude accurate). This requires a lot of fuel.
As others have stated, the current design of the shuttle has some major faults. Not being on the top of the rocket being one of them. This is not news and has been known for a long time and yes it has been taken into account in the next design (which isn't a shuttle at all).
wot no sig
Think of that Canadian pilot whom invented a way to put a jetliner in a slip to lose altitude to land at an abandoned military field when the plane ran out of gas because of metric/imperial issues.
I take that as an reference to Gimli Glider, a story that anybody interested about aviation should read. Another good example of having a human in the loop was 2003 shootdown in Baghdad.
-- Reality checks don't bounce.
Yes, the Shuttle does have autolanding capability. This was added after the loss of Columbia to cover exactly the scenario you postulate.
In the even of an autolanding, the primary recovery site is White Sand NM, with Edwards AFB as backup. They'll use a landing trajectory that minimizes the number of people underneath the landing path.
its heat shield is replaced after every launch as it wasn't designed to be perfect
The replacing the tiles after every launch was actually not part of the original program. Originally the Shuttle was supposed to have a 10 day turnaround time. Like, it lands, they clean it up a bit, and send it off to orbit, almost like an aircraft. You know, it is a -spaceplane-. I still have the Rockwell literature from when I was a kid on it.
Anyway, I think the first cracked or damaged tiles showed up on the first flight. Then the Challenger accident introduced even more procedures. Had we stuck to the original plans for the shuttle, and had a fleet of 10 or so, we would have had a much better STS.
I was actually pretty anti-shuttle for a while but I've come to really appreciate it. I'm actually secretly hoping that Congress will do the politically nutty thing and keep the shuttle, with incremental improvements, to sustain LEO development and recovery of in space objects, and also have the Constellation for long range missions.
This is my sig.
But it's not that NASA scientists "haven't thought about it". It's about beancounters deciding that their table of risk factors doesn't warrant the extra cost, and leaving no margin for error.
No. If you work out the fuel required to move the shuttle from a docking position at Hubble to a docking position at ISS, it requires an amount of fuel that is almost equal to the weight of the entire shuttle itself. It is physically impossible and has nothing to do with the bean counters.
But hell, why let common sense get in the way of ad hominem attacks ... this is /. after all.
Or why let science get in the way of a good conspiracy theory?
Tesla was a genius. Edison however was a overrated hack who liked to torture puppies.
More as in geosynchronous - traveling synchronous with the geo (ground/earth). It would just fail to maintain it's orbit, but that's the idea. :)
0 forward velocity means less friction against the air. Zinging anything across the atmosphere really quickly will ... well ... make a lot of friction, and as it flies through the thinner parts of the atmosphere, it will get hot and not slow very well.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.