ISS Fender Bender

wjsteele writes "Seems that the Space Station has had a minor fender bender. Sounds kind of scary... being in a space craft and hearing metal crunching (like an aluminum can.) Apparently some 'Minor' space debris struck the station around 2:30am this morning, while the astronauts were eating their wheaties." Update: 11/27 16:31 GMT by M : Looks like an experiment may be to blame.

A "brush"?

[PatrickThomson]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but don't things as small as paing flecks cause serious damage at the kind of speeds space junk goes at?

I realise the junk might share the same orbit as the space station and have the same relative velocity blah blah, but consider just how slow it'd have to be moving not to rupture the hull.

Doesnt seem right to me

[hookedup]

The spokesman, who spoke to the Associated Press on condition of anonymity, said by telephone that the space forces had detected an object along the station's orbit. They determined that the object was very small and would pose no danger to the craft.

Shouldnt they at the very least notify the crew to inform them of the junk nearby? And possibly practice a drill for this sort of thing.

Seems to me they lucked out this time, if that had been a bigger piece of junk which would cause major damage, and had ground control had seen it and not said anything, we would have plenty of different headlines this morning.

Re:Minor?

[Anonymous Coward]

I recall a comment that very often the walls of some of the human habitable compartments of the Apollo spacecraft were as thick as kitchen foil.

Remember, the key issues were strength, airtightness, and weight. The strength had to be enough to keep an atmosphere (or large fraction thereof) of air pressure contained - they were less concerned about something piercing the walls because at the kinds of speeds things were likely to hit, it didn't really matter how thick the walls were.

Eating breakfast at 2:30am?

[smart.id]

This brings me to wonder... what time system and time zone (if any) do the astronauts use?

Re:Moving orbit

[phillymjs]

space debris' orbitals are pretty easily predictable, why not shoot them out of orbit with a projectile?

Because the idea is to have less crap floating around in Earth orbit, not more. If the collision between one of your projectiles and its target is of sufficient force, the debris will become a scattered cloud of fragments. Something the size of the fingernail on your pinky put a crater into the windshield of one of the shuttles, do we really want a cloud of them up there?

The laser beam idea might be feasible, but then again, maybe not. SDI turned out to be a lot harder to create than everyone thought, and that dealt with large moving objects traveling predictable paths. Plus you've got to worry about something that you don't want to hit being in the line of fire, which is slightly less of a concern when what you want to hit are nuclear warheads heading for your cities.

Call me crazy, but I think the idea of a few autonomous space trash trucks cruising around up there and picking up errant junk seems like the way to go, once technology has advanced sufficiently to permit it.

~Philly

Re:Space Junk

[Henry V .009]

Even on the Earth's surface, those objects would be pretty spread out. The surface area of a sphere varies by r^2 and stable orbits starts quite a distance away from the Earth. So I would be interested in hearing the exact probability of getting hit by something; I don't imagine it's all that big.

Need the info...

[daveking]

Unless you know what time standard is used on the space station, the assertion that something happened to the space station at 2:30am this morning only gives you the approximate position of the space station relative to the earth and sun during the event. You can't deduce the longitude or Earth surface local time from it, because the space station will have had that relative position multiple times on any given morning.

So how do they handle time out there? I'll bet it involves the word 'Zulu' because that sounds really cool over the radio in movies.

This sort of thing has cropped up before, and it has always been due to human error.

Let's get the facts straight

[xihr]

All they heard on the ISS was a noise. Checks for external damage haven't found anything yet. Surely you hear hear the occasional weird noise in your apartment/house; that doesn't mean it was hit by a meteor, does it?

Acoustic location

[ipsender]

Surely the astonishing finding is that there would appear to be no on-board vibration (sound) sensor array networked to a computer which could accurately determine the source and probable nature of the disturbance. Or does that feature come with v2.0?

Re:Minor?

[Kris_J]

According to This article on BBC News Michael Foale is no stranger to this: "He was onboard the Mir space station in 1987 when a Progress supply tanker crashed into it - one of the most dangerous incidents to have ever taken place in space."

I've just finished reading Dragonfly, a book all about the incident you mention. Summarising: A manual docking system wasn't nearly up to the task of docking a Progress, and because of frequent system failures, the Russians bring them in fast and break hard. They'd had to turn off radar telemetry because it was interfering with a video signal from the Progress. The Progress hit the station, punching a postage-stamp sized hole in one section and damaging a solar array. The crew were able to seal off affected section, but only after effectively crippling the station because they had to unplug all the cables going through a doorway.

This was shortly after a near miss of another Progress, a fire in one of the oxygen generators and a bunch of other system failures. The Russians more or less took it in their stride. The Americans, less so.

If anyone is interested in these events, dig out the book. I don't have time to find an Amazon link at the moment -- will post one if no one beats me to it.