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Mir to be Abandoned Today
Tom Rothamel writes, based on a story at FloridaToday.com, "Mir will be abandoned later today, ending a streak of permanent human habitation of space that began on September 6, 1989. There's a chance that one more crew will be sent before earth reclaims it sometime next year." I always hoped we (humans) would launch a better orbiting habitat by the time Mir became unliveable, but we didn't. Sad.
Try the book of Revelation:
And the star fell upon the third part of the river, and the star's name was wormwood, and many men died of the waters for they had been made bitter.
The ukranian word for wormwood is chernobyl.
I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
Actually, that's the problem with Mir, its skin is too corroded. In a few years, it would start leaking air like a sieve. Things put in space take a hell of a lot of sandblasting from micrometeorite impacts that there's no atmosphere to protect from. So it's not even good for parts.
I suppose they could sell it too, but bridges seem to be the more popular model in that product line.
I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
If you traveled at .5 c and ran into an asteroid the size of a small pebble... Blammo. Kinda a crap shoot, ain't it?
I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
The computers in Mir use "old" technology in order to be more reliable. Since Mir is a space station it gets exposed to a lot of radiation. The effects of radiation on computer equipment are cumulative, and the Mir has been up a long time. Computers on earth don't have to operate in such conditions. Most of the radiation hitting the processor in your pc probably comes from radiactive decay of isotopes in the metal of the computer's case. Not so in space. Ever hear of cosmic rays? A good number of these particles beat the best speeds we can get in accelerators by a long shot. So, those modern chips you're touting as the best thing since electronic sausages, with their tiny, tiny little transistore and pathways and what have you, will be shot to pieces in no time. The older technology won't last forever either, but it'll last a heck of a lot longer. It has already been observed by plenty of astronauts that their laptops develop problems distressingly fast in space.
Oh, and forget sheilding. Do you have any idea how much lead you'd need? Keeping lots of replacement parts on hand is a maybe, but don't forget that the replacement parts would be exposed the the same levels of radiation.
I mean, really, what did you think? Did you think that the Russians were still banging rocks together to make tools?
Sorry if I was long winded. I just felt that the notion that Mir's "outdated" computers were somehow inferior or unsafe for the job at hand was a misconception that needed correcting.
If MIR, by some strange happenstance, lands in my lawn, can I make a treehouse out of it?
:)
any thoughts?
burn the computers. go back to the abacus.
After 10 years in space, Mir is a creaking old hulk; the cosmonauts spend much of their time on maintenance, not science. It wasn't designed to last this long, and if the Russians still had a space program the thing to do would be to launch a new, up-to-date core incorporating the lessons learned from the original, and move over the modules which are still of use. The old core is not worth the fuel required to keep it in orbit. Perhaps it could be useful on the way down, for instance as a test of controlled re-entry using electrodynamic tethers, but in space it's already barely more than a hazard to navigation.
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
I've found this link which tells you every minute where MIR is in Space : http://liftoff.msfc.nasa.gov/temp /StationLoc.html
none Yet.
I suggest the German Space Operations Centre's.
(And, if you enter your coordinates manually and you are in North America, remember that the longitude should be negative... See http://www2.gsoc.dlr.de/scrip ts/satvis/geodistrib.asp)
And Nostradomus, the European prophet, foretold of the Great Mars's fire coming down on the skies in the 7th month of 1999 (7th month can be interpreted as July or August, as August being the time after 7 months. People were weird back then).
Nostradomus predectied the world to end.
And as Mir means life in Russian, it also means world.
So, all of the Nostradomus fans can say he was right again. Most of N's predictions were interpreted like this anyway, which is why he had such a high "sucess" rate.
-bugg
Well let's be sure to clean up and vacuum. I want us to get our security deposit back.
Fun at the office: Get a polar projection map of the earth and raffle off each 10 degrees of longitude for $1, $5, whatever. Whoever holds the slice where the biggest chunck of Mir lands wins the pot. (I did this for Skylab and it was a hoot.)
I bet Bill Gates would pay for it.
"Mr. Gates, we want to drop Mir into the sun."
"On Sun? Kewl,let me get my checkbook."
George
Because the Sun has 99.86 percent of the mass of the solar system and we couldn't bother it even if we dropped Jupiter in. There's already more iron, plutonium, and everything else there than in the entire Earth. For that matter, a single asteroid has more metals than the Earth's upper crust.
MIR and ISS have to be boosted to higher orbits periodically because various forces (mainly atmospheric and magnetic drag) slow them down. The MIR sponsors simply no longer want to keep paying to keep MIR in orbit. If MIR were put in a higher orbit and abandoned it would eventually come down through the altitude of ISS and be a threat to it. Clamping MIR to ISS would still require that someone send up fuel (or bring it down from the Moon) to keep them in orbit. And MIR/ISS have to be continually flown to keep their solar arrays turned toward the Sun.
Remember the recent story of research in using a plasma field as a solar sail? Would one of those generate enough force to offset the drag on MIR? Granted, it could only be turned on when the solar wind would push it away from the Earth (or in a forward direction in the orbit) so it would not slow the thing down...
No, no, microwave ranges come from RADAR work done during and around WW2. People who walked in front of big radars with food (one story claims it was a candy bar) found that they heated up.
Early, primitive ranges were sold for consumers in the 50's. They were as big as large refrigerators, but they really did work. They didn't shrink to a managable size and price until the late 70's and early 80's, however.
And just to get this off of my chesst, I really hate microwaves. Conventional stoves and ovens work fine for me: there are few kinds of food that I make that can be zapped. More intracate preparation is usually required.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
Yep, and as far as I know, the Apollo program didn't accomplish anything either, besides the publicity stunt. And neither has the Space Shuttle, for that matter, besides some fancy pyrotechnics from one of them... And neither has Hubble, besides some cool wallpaper images, and Pathfinder was just another useless publicity stunt...
Sheesh, some people...
"Be nice, veer left, and never stop thinking" Iain Banks - Walking On Glass
Yes and no. While it's a good way up the Earth's gravity well, it would still need to cancel out its orbital speed around the Sun to fall there directly. That's 30 km/s to add to the necessary 3 km/s delta-V to escape Earth.
In terms of fuel, according to the rocket equation (delta-V = u . ln(1+mf/m) where u is the exhaust speed, m the dry mass and mf the fuel's mass), it would take more than 700 times as much fuel as Mir weighs to make it dive into the Sun with a chemical rocket (u ~ 5 km/s). Perhaps you can save some using planetary fly-bys but certainly not much. Or use an ion engine like Deep Space 1's; with a very optimistic u=15 km/s, the required mass of fuel would drop to 10 times as much, a mere 1400 tons, compared to a few tons for sending it into the Pacific...
Anyway, if you have the resources and technology to send Mir out into the Sun, you can easily park it into high Earth orbit where it will stay for long, and build a brand new huge space dock there and bring in a small asteroid to manufacture interplanetary ships with. More interesting, I would say...
IMO, the biggest tragedy of the Challenger disaster was how far behind the US space program has been since it occured. People almost seemed shocked that spaceflight was dangerous... hello?
I think those that died would've wanted the program to continue (fixing the problem obviously) but would not have wanted the program to fall so far behind. I think they would've been better honored by not only getting caught back up on the schedule, but perhaps learning lessons and moving ahead even faster.
It also cracks me up when people say we've wasted so much on the space program without getting anything in return. They have no idea how many advancements in computers, medicine, science, etc we owe to the space program(s).
- My favorite error message: xscreensaver, running on an old Sparc 5 w/ 8bit color: bsod: Couldn't allocate color Blue
The efforts and achievements of the Russians with respect to Mir deserve the highest praise.
The data and experience on human survival in space that they have gained for the world will offer countless potentially life-saving insights to problems that will be encountered in ANY future space-habitation projects.
The fact that their project did not have the polish and glitz of space projects in the US does nothing to detract from the value of their efforts. They kept men alive in orbit for a very long time, and they did it on a shoe string. The lower funding forced them to be creative and resourceful. We owe them our thanks, and will for a long time to come.
SPACIBO!
**>>BELCH
Orbital velocity is around 8000 meters per second. Boosting to Earth escape velocity (roughly 11,000 m/sec) requires a delta-V of 3000 m/sec. By the rocket equation, the ratio of initial mass to final mass is e to the power of 1.2 (3000/2500), so you would need 3.32-1=2.32 times as much mass of fuel as Mir's mass. You could launch a couple new Mir's for that.
To get to the Sun by the least-energy route requires a flight past Jupiter, which requires roughly as much delta-V as a solar escape burn. Call it a delta-V of about 12,500 meters per second. Using oxygen-hydrogen with an exhaust velocity of 4500 m/sec, the fuel required would be about 15 times the mass of Mir (and a hell of a lot bulkier; liquid hydrogen is about 1/14 the density of water).
If you want to save Mir, I'm sure everybody would be happy to let you pay for this.
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
Posted by Synsthe:
Humanity must look elsewhere to live and prosper, or we're going to go the same way as the dinosaurs,
Go the way of the dinosaurs? We'd be lucky to go the way of the dinosaurs, instead of the direction we're heading now.
After all, they did live and rule the earth for millions upon millions of years. In comparison, our somewhere between a few thousand to 10,000+ years (depending on who you listen to) years here is nothing. We've been a blink of the eye compared to how long they lasted, and yet we're already doing a good job of making the place unlivable for ourselves.. and worrying that things are going to come to an end.. and this and that and the next thing.
Pretty pathetic on our parts if you ask me, which you didn't.
--
Mark Waterous (mark@projectlinux.org)
Here are a few things to consider.
First of all, Mir can't really be abandoned where it is. The low orbits that Mir, ISS, and the shuttle fly in are not stable. They decay due to minute amounts of atmospheric drag. You couldn't leave Mir where it is because it would have to be periodically re-occupied and boosted. If you did, who knows when and where it would re-enter. It could hit land and cause a lot of damage. If Mir was to be abandoned, it would have to be in a much higher orbit than even ISS.
Second, if you put it into a high enough orbit so that orbital decay is no longer an issue, you won't be able to reach it with the shuttle or a Soyuz capsule anymore.
Third, you can't put space vehicles into a higher orbit by just pushing up. They must be accelerated to the velocity corresponding to the higher orbit. To get Mir into a sufficiently high orbit, you would have to increase its current velocity quite a lot.
Think for a minute how much energy (in other words fuel) was required to get Mir's various parts up to their current velocity. Even with the biggest rockets Russia had, Mir had to be lifted in parts. To speed Mir up sufficiently, you would need to transport an absolutely huge amount of fuel into space.
Unfortunately, you can't just move Mir a little, then resupply it, then move it again, and so on. It wouldn't take long before the shuttle and Soyuz rockets wouldn't be able to reach it to bring more fuel. That means you need to bring all of the fuel up there and attach it to Mir before you start moving it. And that means that you have to accelerate the fuel too in addition to Mir, which dramatically increases the amount required.
Getting that much fuel to Mir would be incredibly expensive. First you would need to build a very large container for it, send it up, and dock it to Mir. Then you need to send multiple rocket and/or shuttle launches to fill it up, with specially trained spacewalking crews to perform the fuel transfers.
Fourth, even if you could get that much fuel into orbit, how would you go about boosting Mir? You couldn't just use Mir's propulsion system. It would take forever and you would need to perform some major modifications of Mir to attach and use a very large external fuel source. You would need to build a special purpose rocket module and bring it to Mir. Also, remember that some of the sensitive parts of Mir (like the solar array) aren't designed to hold up to forces of acceleration when deployed, so who knows whether the station would even survive such a burn.
Mir has been in orbit years longer than it was originally designed for.
There have been fires, life support failures and collisions.
Crews living there spend all their time just trying to keep the thing running.
Years of actual EXPERIENCE, warts and all, that no computer simulation could ever hope to impart. The simple fact that they ENDURED and KEPT GOING right through the failures and emergencies is EXACTLY what is so pricelessly valuable about the station's MANY contributions to science.
Dollar for dollar, I think MIR has made by far one of the GREATEST contributions EVER to the advancement of mankind's knowledge of long-term survival in space.
They didn't quit. They didn't give up when things got dangerous or unpredictable. They endured, they did the time and they deserve our praise.
**>>BELCH