Satellite Debris Forces ISS Crew Into Rescue Craft 171
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.
Lasers (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Lasers (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Lasers (Score:5, Funny)
deflector dish must've been tied up by those assholes in stellar cartography.....
they're always tyin that MFin deflector dish up.....
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
The deflector dish was jammed... strawberry flavour I think.
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Lasers (Score:5, Funny)
well they probably still have that golf club for the publicity stunt a while back, so they should send one guy out on space walk and have him start swinging.
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
FTFA The space station is orbiting at 17,500mph. The debris is moving at 19,800mph. Assuming they are an precisely the same orbit, the debris is still moving at least 2,300mph relative to the station. (And worst case some 35,000mph...)
You might want to rethink trying to hit it with a golf club.
Re:Lasers (Score:5, Funny)
Yeah, a hockey stick would work much better.
Re: (Score:2)
You might want to rethink trying to hit it with a golf club.
Yeah, a hockey stick would work much better.
Happy Gilmore, is that you?
Re:Lasers (Score:5, Funny)
No, I'm home sick today.
Re:Lasers (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
Not to mention that they couldn't figure out where the debris was headed - It missed the ISS by almost 3 miles. Whoever was tasked with knocking the thing down would have to have really good eyes to see the thing incoming and be able to throw that golf club really accurately.
Re: (Score:2)
Throw? Son, they were suppose to tee off. FORE!
Re:Lasers (Score:5, Funny)
An excellent plan, sir, with just 2 major drawbacks: (1) We don't have any shields, and (2) we don't have a any shields. I realize this is technically just one drawback, but I thought it was so important it was worth mentioning twice.
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
The USSR had Polyus, which never made it to orbit, which had a self-defense cannon and a blinding laser. http://www.astronautix.com/craft/polyus.htm [astronautix.com]
However if don't incinerate the target, then you are left with more debris that you may run into. They need a space "refuse" service which will remove
debris, old satellites, and other stuff. Maybe all space faring countries can contribute to an fund that will allow an creation of this organization so that some private or public organization will do this job.
Re: (Score:2)
I resemble that remark.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Cleaning up all the junk in orbit suddenly becomes an "action item". But the Soyuz is a much smaller, much sturdier target.
Re: (Score:2)
I'd like to just see them stop creating so much space debris - I'm still pretty pissed over the Chinese blowing up their sat and leaving junk in a useful orbit...
OK - The next person to kick a toaster out the airlock gets a month in the brig. Sorry, that's the way it has to be.
Re: (Score:2)
I'd like to just see them stop creating so much space debris - I'm still pretty pissed over the Chinese blowing up their sat and leaving junk in a useful orbit...
Perhaps it was done to hamper the space efforts of other countries.
Re: (Score:2)
Ooh, a directional pipe bomb sat, set up to poison LEO. That would suck.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
If it hits the Soyuz, you just exit the module and seal the airlock. On the other hand, if you're on the far side of the station and it puts a hole in that much larger target, you're in a somewhat more precarious predicament.
Additionally, as the Soyuz is intended to return to earth, with all the stresses and such involved in that, it can probably withstand an impact better than the much less robust station.
Re:Soyuz is invincible. (Score:5, Insightful)
Sturdy or not, objects hitting you while going a couple of thousand miles per hour (relative to your own speed) tend to leave a lasting (if not final) impression.
Re:Soyuz is invincible. (Score:5, Interesting)
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 [usatoday.com]
**Google: 22000 mph in meters per second = 9834.88 meters per second.
SB
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
That's the lowest possible figure, assuming the two shared nearly the same orbit.
SB
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Considering the size/mass and velocity of this object - and I agree it'd be nice to have more info :) - I doubt the orientation would have made much difference.
The other modules would have absorbed some of the kinetic energy - perhaps all of it if the object , whatever it was, was fragile enough to have disintegrated when it hit them. But if it was a very solid piece - like, say, a fuel pump - it probably would go completely thru them, too.
Even with the modules on either side that st
Re: (Score:2)
> It *will* happen, eventually. That satellite that was impacted recently had a lot
> smaller cross-section than ISS does. I'm actually rather surprised that the ISS hasn't
> been holed by something smaller yet.
The Air Force has neither the resources nor the mandate to precisely track and plot every object that has any significant chance of hitting any satellite but they do so for anything that looks like it might hit the ISS. They publish approximate orbital elements for everything over 4".
Re: (Score:2)
Apparently by your criteria I will never die because I age~
I like that line of thinking.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Yeah, for a 2002 model it's doing pretty good isn't it? (If you disregard the multiple times it has suffered systems failure on re-entry.)
Seriously - though people refer to the craft as generically as 'Soyuz', that is like referring to all Ford Thunderbird's as a 'Thunderbird' without regards to model year. The current mark of Soyuz is the Soyuz-TMA, which had it's first flight in 2002 and has only flown 12 complete missions with
Re: (Score:2)
Ya visu ochen interesyenya devoschku!
Nice reporting (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
This is Slashdot, there will be a dupe tonight by kdawson where the number will be changed. Don't expect it to be right then either though.
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
You're right. And I for one am beginning to question how they got 213 midgets and a donkey in the space station.
Re: (Score:2)
That was my thought. I figured that the ISS could hold 12 max.
Soyez can hold 3. I would love to know how they put 18 in there.
Re: (Score:2)
They will call it.. (Score:2)
Re:Nice reporting (Score:5, Funny)
I'd bittorrent that.
Fixed that for you
18 Crew? (Score:4, Insightful)
... or Expedition 18?
Re: (Score:2)
How many crew members? (Score:2)
3 people on board, not 18 (Score:3, Informative)
So androids don't count, huh? (Score:3, Funny)
Bigot! Someday we will rise up against our . . . uh, oh, never mind. Human here. Not an escaped replicant.
Re: (Score:2)
Duh, the americans count for nine people each, the russian doesn't count.
Expedition 18 to the ISS. Not 18 members. (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
TMA-13? (Score:3, Funny)
WTF? Are they hauling them back from Jupiter now?
In other news (Score:5, Funny)
.... 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.
Oblig. Scotty quote (Score:2)
I canno' change the laws o' slashdot... I mean, physics!
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
... There goes your ability to EVER moderate posts again... ;-)
Re: (Score:2)
Why was this modded funny? I'm pretty sure I -am- blacklisted from moderation. Not that U can't laugh aHeh. =:-O
(If there's an actual admin who sees this: after 13 years using slashdot.org and karma="50", I don't think I've been picked for moderation since before XP came out. Mostly I'm curious... either there's bias in the selection, or I offended someone..)
Re: (Score:2)
> "Update: 03/12 18:42 GMT by T [monkey.org] : The original story incorrectly said the ISS had 18 crew members. Luckily for the three in the Soyuz, that was a mistake."
Hey, T [monkey.org], the three already in the Soyuz would be protected, right? Regardless of how many more there may or may not have been... They don't need luck.
Makes no sense ya mah'rune.
Opportunity is perfect (Score:2, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
What if you used an ion drive and a fuel system for quick maneuvering. Maybe soemthing that can dock with the Space Station for refueling?
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Opportunity is perfect (Score:5, Informative)
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...
Re: (Score:2)
I would have done it radically different for the items that I mentioned (10 cm's up to a set size).
Of course, I was picking particular sizes for a reason.
When it is a bigger systems, such as a Sat, then it might be nice to put a small disposable system together.
Finally, whe
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
So that's three major orbital manoeuvres, per fragment.
You make it too complicated. You don't have to pick up the fragment, move yourself, then drop the fragment. You just have to exchange velocity with the fragment during a very brief interaction, flinging you every-so-slightly outside your orbit,and flinging it every-so-slightly inside it's orbit. Gravity takes care of the rest.
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).
Again, too complicated. What you need is something large, light weight, and sticky. A simple cylinder filled with an aero-gel just needs to fly through the debris cloud, letting t
Re: (Score:2)
An enormous cylinder filled with aero-gel ... (or sharks or lawyers or whatever)
You're neglecting how mind bogglety big space is. Don't think debris cloud, think "large areas of volume with a few tiny little bits of dangerous, fast moving matter". It's not like you can see the debris from afar. No "on deck there! There be debris!". No space Roombas.
Re: (Score:2)
Stop it.
We know space is big.
Actually, the poster know it better then you, becasue by comparison, any container of aero-gel we make will be small.
We coudl sue many large containers of areo-gel.
It doesn't make you look smart and you are not helping.
And how fast it's moving only matter in comparison to how fast the aero-gel is moving.
The poster idea is very smart, and it seems workable. In fact, something like that would make a good anti satellite weapon. Instead of blowing it up, cover it with an aero-gel cl
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
You make it too complicated. You don't have to pick up the fragment, move yourself, then drop the fragment. You just have to exchange velocity with the fragment during a very brief interaction, flinging you every-so-slightly outside your orbit,and flinging it every-so-slightly inside it's orbit. Gravity takes care of the rest.
Unfortunately all gravity is going to take care off is steering both objects around the earth in perfectly normal orbits. Remember, there's no such thing as an unstable orbit (excluding certain complicated interactions with other bodies) --- all orbits are stable unless they hit something (like the atmosphere). Any debris low enough to be easy to deorbit is most likely going to do so soon of its own accord anyway. To deorbit the rest, you're going to have to change its velocity by a lot. Otherwise you achie
Re: (Score:2)
Except that these debris clouds are often kilometers in diameter, and aerogel is expensive. It runs about $5 per square foot just for the relatively thin stuff used to insulate jackets or refrigerators. One would have to use something considerably thicker to stop objects larger than dust particles moving at thousands of miles per hour relative to your garbage collector.
Also, a simple cylinder would not suffice. You'd have to have a disk of the stuff, probably at least half a km or so in diam
Re: (Score:2)
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...
All new satellites need passive deorbiting features. I read a journal article a couple years ago which stated that a few pounds of very thin, very long metal cable that would release and trail out behind a satellite for something like many hundreds of meters would produce enough drag to take down things in low Earth orbit in the few months to few years time frame.
Re: (Score:2)
How about just opening the shuttle windows, and firing on the debris with a BB gun?
Works against those pesky kids on my lawn...
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
The real problem is how to touch it and to grapple it? The sats were not made to be held. They have pieces that break off easily. In addition, many are cylindrical. Solve that, and the rest falls in place.
Irony (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
This is starting to get silly... (Score:3, Interesting)
At some point all those agencies (government and private) who have put that junk up there are going to have to get together and find a solution. That includes all the private sat operators who have left stuff up there as well as the national space agencies.
At the moment everyone seems to be saying, "well, it's not *all* my mess, so I'm not cleaning it up". At some point this is going to start impacting (literally) everyone involved with space. We've already lost a few satellites, how many more do we need to lose before people get off their arses and find a proper solution.
You could probably work out the approximate proportions of the total problem were caused by each agency/company, so divide the bill up accordingly.
Of course, anyone who has watched engineers divide up the bill in a restaurant will know that probably isn't as easy as it sounds...
Re:This is starting to get silly... (Score:4, Funny)
Just say who ever pays the biggest portion gets to put weapons in space~
Hmm, how about a committee? (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
Please mod parent informative. I certainly had never heard of them.
Debris Details (Score:5, Informative)
Here's a picture [wikipedia.org] of a PAM-D motor.
Re: (Score:2)
The debris was small, just 1/3 of an inch long, and was flying at about 19,800 mph, NASA officials said. The space station orbits the Earth at about 17,500 mph.
That's nothing. I'm moving through space [enchantedlearning.com] at 64,800mph and I'm just sitting here at my desk!
Re: (Score:2)
Interesting; the size that space.com quotes seems too small - from what I've read the minimum size of debris they can track in LEO is about ten cm.
As I noted in another post USA Today's article puts the size at about five inches, which seems more plausible.
The size difference may not seem important to some, but it's a pretty big difference at those speeds, the difference between a (likely patchable) hole in the ISS and probable complete destruction of a module.
SB
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Here's the most recent info I can find (Feb 2009) FWIW:
From: http://www.spacemart.com/reports/The_Problem_Of_Space_Junk_999.html [spacemart.com]
Quote:
"The total number of discovered and monitored pieces with a diameter of more than 10 centimeters is approaching 14,000. Something like 950 of them are functioning satellites from different countries.
The number of bodies up to 10 centimeters in size has reached 200,000 to 250,000; between 0.1 centimeter and 1 centimeter, 70 million to 80 million
Re: (Score:2)
I doubt that there is a sharp boundary above which they can see everything clearly and below which all is invisible. More likely 10cm is the limit above which they are confident that they have detected and cataloged pretty much everything while below that things get increasingly iffy the smaller you go.
Re: (Score:2)
I realize that. But we're still talking about at least an order of magnitude difference in size; squared if we're talking about radar cross sections.
In any case, at this point we'll just have to wait and see if NASA publishes more solid data. As of a couple hours ago I'd not seen anything official on the news section of their website.
I wonder if they've been able to keep tracking this object? Like you said in your other reply, they would tend to concentrate on immediate threats to IS
Who is to blame? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
It's particularly difficult to pardon the hypocrisy your sweeping statement if, as I suspect, you happen to be in North America.
Re: (Score:2)
What do you have against Mexicans? It's not like AEXA is putting up a whole lot of rockets. Or actually even doing a lot of existing.
Re: (Score:2)
It's good to remind America not to get on it's high horse about this (*ahem* Mountain removal, and the blind eye the US media turns to it...).
On the other hand, we didn't sink all our oldest culture under 3 Gorges Dam, and we don't deliberately put melamine poison onto food, toys, and baby formula. Weak as our FDA is, they check on these things...
Re: (Score:2)
Jim Hightower would be proud
Re: (Score:2)
Hypocrisy or not, I was looking for an informed discussion as opposed to culture wars or finger-pointing.
And why is it particularly difficult to pardon? Have you conflated what my country/government does with my actions? Why am I suddenly the Supreme Envoy of The United States? I am quite tired of the rest of the world rabbiting on about the USA's hypocrisy while they themselves commit similar acts.
I do my tiny part to correct the kinds of missteps The States make but one person (most people) can only do so
Re: (Score:2)
So you started your informed discussion with "no culture war or finger-pointing" by making a sweeping statement about 1.5 billion people... I'm no supporter of the Chinese government, but I'm no supporter of sanctimony either.
Go to your local dumpsite (do you know where it is?) and tell me how North American (including Canadian) consumerism is demonstrating its respect for the environment. Can you drink any of the water wi
Re: (Score:2)
It's particularly difficult to pardon the hypocrisy your sweeping statement if, as I suspect, you happen to be in North America.
I'll take the environmental standards and pollution levels in the USA over China's any day of the week.
Re: (Score:2)
Have you been to your local dumpsite? Imagine if there were 1.5 billion Americans (and Canadians). How would North American consumption patterns and "environmental standards" really compare?
Re: (Score:2)
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.
Yeah, those other countries will be eager to pay you whatever you tell them...right. It took decades to get any sort of compensation out of the Soviet Union after one of their failed satellites contaminated large swaths of northern Canada with radioactive debris. The United States was fined $400 for littering when parts of Skylab came down in rural Australia (a fine which remains unpaid to this day). The response from most countries would probably be something on the lines of "f*** off", albeit in more poli
Re: (Score:2)
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.
Just clean it up with water [wsj.com]. What could be easier?
Re: (Score:2)
Oh, I'm sure the reason OP didn't come up with a better example is that he was being crushed by a fucking tank. Come on -- China is what the Bush regime aspired to be like.
Note The Source (Score:3, Interesting)
The debris wasn't from a smashed satellite, either from collision with another or blasted by a missile. It was their own trash, "a piece of a satellite rocket motor left behind by an earlier space shuttle mission". The chances of something from an entirely different orbit impacting a craft are still infinitesimal. To quote the philosopher Adams "Space is big. Really big. You wouldn't believe how mind-boggling big it is." Compare to broken junk floating around even near Earth orbit is that big.
Re:Note The Source (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Look, we're gonna have to do this... (Score:2)
...so let's do it right the first few times:
1. Send up a net to catch the big stuff. The size of the net and opening determines how many nets we send up. throw the net at Earth. Stuff burns up. The final net will probably more like mesh. On to step 2.
2. Send up a disk of Aerogel. We did this on a smaller scale [spaceref.com] to capture comet debris. We don't need to get this one back, it can burn up when we throw this at Earth also. But if it doesn't burn, just aim it at the Pacific. Or Russia, some if it is their
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
They really need to build that big laser/water cannon to blast this stuff out of orbit
I didn't read the article the other day (being /., why would I bother?) but wouldn't the water cannon wind up leaving ice particles floating around up there? Wouldn't re-supplying it be a PITA?
Re: (Score:2)
There you go again....letting pesky details get in the way of a good story.
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Trouble with that idea is that it'll only detect objects in almost exactly the same orbit as the ISS. And if they are in the same orbit, their velocities will be almost identical (Kepler's third law, correct?), and so the object will probably never catch the ISS (and if it did, their relative velocities would be quite low).
From the differences in velocity mentioned in the space.com article, I'd guess that the debris is moving in a much more elliptical orbit than the ISS is. Makes it lots harder to detect.