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ISS Nearly Clobbered By Space Debris
erice writes "A chuck of space debris came within 335 meters of the space station, forcing the crews to head to their escape capsules and prepare for emergency evacuation to Earth. '[NASA's] Associate Administrator for Space Operations, Bill Gerstenmaier, said it was the closest a debris object had ever come to the station. An analysis was now underway to try to understand its origin, he added.'"
What about a Bob or a John of space debris? Hmmmm?
I'm glad no harm came to the crew, but its good that an occurrence of this sort happened without injuring anyone. Maybe now they will start to develop smarter technology to help prevent disasters such as this in space.
The best way to predict the future is to invent it. -Alan Kay
Clearly we need astronauts who are better at playing Asteroids.
I skimmed the article, but I don't see that they mention how they noticed the debris. How was that done? Because they crew went into the escape capsules, you'd think it was detected i advance. How long in advance? Otherwise, perhaps they just felt that after one piece had already passed them, others were likely to follow, motivating the emergency readyness.
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An analysis was now underway to try to understand its origin.
A small planet called Krypton.
Even Low-Earth orbit that the ISS flies in isn't safe without it.
Actually, I would guess that LEO is the most dangerous places to be, debris-wise. All debris has to pass through LEO eventually as it enters the atmosphere, and it has the smallest volume of space, so statistically speaking, I'd think the chances of getting hit are by far the highest in LEO.
-- Let us endeavor so to live that when we pass even the undertaker shall be sorry. -- M. Twain
Debris From Satellites' Collision Said to Pose Small Risk to Space Station
It seems like the risk isn't that small after all.
It's by far more likely that the debris is from something the human race has launched into space. It's in low Earth orbit. Pretty much everything that comes from outer space either flies past the earth (see yesterday's encounter with 2011 MD) or slams into it as a shooting star (meteor/meteorite). Something from outer space has to lose an awful lot of speed just as it passes the Earth to end up in Low Earth orbit, which just doesn't happen.
But how is just over one third of a kilometer considered a near miss?
You can never know everything, and part of what you do know will always be wrong. Perhaps even the most important part.
Maybe it was an excess apostrophe.
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Yes, a giant magnet that can also attract aluminium, titanium, gold, austenitic stainless steel and all that other stuff normal magnets can't catch. Why not make it a monopole while we are at it :)
Wouldn't LEO be safer because the drag there is much higher, so debris will quickly pass through and fall down to Earth? Unlike GEOish-orbits where I got the impression it'd be circling for a very long time.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Satellites are mostly built of light-weight, non magnetic materials such as aluminium.
Magnets suffer from inverse square law problems: the largest magnets on earth have an operating range of inches, maybe a few feet.
Because everything in orbit is travelling at high relative speeds, the amount of time any bit of debris spent within the "capture region" of a magnet would be milliseconds at best, not lone enough to match energies.
Consciousness is an illusion caused by an excess of self consciousness.
The module on Mir which was holed in a collision was a write off, so I think it is likely the ISS would be as well. Probably a lot of gear inside the station would be written off by exposure to vacuum. The lack of cooling would destroy electronics, for example, but the same gear would be kept running for a long as possible to aid in the escape. I think repopulating the ISS would be very expensive, difficult and dangerous.
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Its compartmentalized, so if one module is lost the others can be sealed off and continue being used. If all modules are punctured in one event, then yes, total loss is probable.
Problem is the HOW. E.g. a plasma cloud wouldn't really help much against high speed debris as they'd just punch through it with their sheer force, even if they do get vaporized they'd likely still hit the hull in that extremely hot state and cause a lot of damage (there's a concept for combining electric reactive armor with a strong magnetic field for tanks so projectiles are turned into plasma and the magnets assist with the deflection but I'm not sure that would stop a modern AP shell and I'm not sure how those even compare to space debris). I don't think there's a real concept for how energy bubbles could even work.
If we could deliver payload to space more easily we could possibly build heavy armor on our spacecrafts that may be able to take some bigger hits than the current stuff (spacecrafts and suits are already armored with a thick foam layer but that won't stop more than tiny, low energy debris).
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
This probably isn't even near the top of the list of things to worry about.
But gravity would do that, right? So let's just hold a huge mass sufficiently close to those objects to change their flight path... Maybe in circles around our huge mass.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
I'm not sure, but remember that the volume of space goes up cubicly, so it would take quite a bit of debris to make up for the vastness of GEO compared to LEO.
-- Let us endeavor so to live that when we pass even the undertaker shall be sorry. -- M. Twain
...without getting clobbered by space debris, or more accurately, our own space junk.
Statistics I had heard years ago spoke of some 8,000 objects that NORAD tracks in our orbit. I'm certain that number has grown significantly since then, but I wonder how much of that we have been responsible for putting up there? Seems our habits in space tend to mirror our (bad) habits on earth.
Where is the offense and defense?
Am I to believe that "outer space" is not the current front-runner in the list of possibilities?
Up in GEO the debris are much more organized, they roam the area looking for targets and pillage... If we are lucky they will kill us first...
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I hope I'm not the only one that read that and thought "Escape capsules? Oh, that is awesome!" Please tell me there's video. Are they all acting calmly and reasonably as expected, or is one of them going "Game over, man! GAME OVER!"?
Yes, I'm glad they weren't actually hit. But in a world where we have PEOPLE! IN! SPACE! and 99.9999% of the population doesn't know their names (me included), a little drama once in awhile isn't such a bad thing.
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Prisencolinensinainciusol. Ol Rait!
It's time they add lasers to the ISS, to shoot away that kind of stuff.
Once Bigelow builds their space station, it will be above most of this. That will help a lot of things, though you still have to travel up there.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
A South monopole or a North monopole would get pulled towards the earth's North or South pole. If we want it to keep going around in orbit we better make it an East or West monopole :)
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
A rail gun might work.
[NASA's] Associate Administrator for Space Operations, Bill Gerstenmaier, said it was the closest a debris object had ever come to the station. An analysis was now underway to try to understand its origin, he added.
My understanding is that the station mostly originated in the US and Russia, with help from about sixteen other countries. NASA's Associate Administrator for Space Operations should really know this, or at least be able to look this up on Wikipedia.
I find it very hard to believe that the ISS has not been hit by micro-sized debris considering one of the shuttles has and various low-earth satellites have also. I suspect that it has plenty of small craters...
Couldn't the Daedalus have just moved in-between and caught the projectile in their shields? What do we fund SG1 for if not to protect space?
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
Was the debris traveling several times the speed of sound (in air...) relative to your car? If so, I would recommend avoiding the ghetto when driving to work...
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
So how long will it be before some pariah-state with primitive space capability, in yet another fit of childish Beloved Leader temper-tantrum-class behavior, launches a canister of one-inch aluminum bearings into crowded orbits to create orbital minefields to destroy satellites and otherwise be a pain in the ass?
Yes, that would be without question an act of war, just like mining sea lanes in international waters would be. Does anyone think that would stop a Beloved Leader from doing it if he could use the war-drums to cling to power?
Everybody gets what the majority deserves.
That's a stupid statement on all sorts of levels. "We haven't had two airliners collide in mid-air in a long time, we should just get rid of air traffic control!"
It's because it is a concern and they take steps to mitigate it. There's a reason the Shuttles have so many layers of redundancy, and it's not just for internal equipment failures.