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Comments: 389 +- Science: Dropped Shuttle Toolbag Filmed From Earth on Sunday November 23 2008, @06:49PM
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cathector writes "An article at spaceweather.com reports that the toolbag dropped during Heidemarie Stefanyshyn-Piper's spacewalk has been recorded on film from earth: 'When Endeavour astronaut Heidemarie Stefanyshyn-Piper dropped her toolbag during a spacewalk on Nov. 18th and it floated away, mission controllers probably figured they'd seen the last of it. Think again. Last night, Nov. 22nd, veteran satellite observer Kevin Fetter video-recorded the backpack-sized bag gliding over his backyard observatory in Brockville, Ontario. "It was easily 8th magnitude or brighter as it passed by the 4th magnitude star eta Pisces," he says. Spaceweather's satellite tracker is monitoring the toolbag.'"
The actual loss of the bag was filmed, too; reader Kagura links in a comment on the original story to this YouTube clip of the bag's escape.
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That's no moon! (Score:5, Funny)
That's a tool bag!
Re:That's no moon! (Score:4, Funny)
No, it's a tarp!
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Re:That's no moon! (Score:5, Interesting)
That's a tool bag!
Sigh...
There go another set of $10,000 government hammers -- not to mention the $24,000 socket set :(
(Ha. As an aside, I wonder how much that tool bag really cost when you factor in its mass during launch.)
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Re:That's no moon! (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:That's no moon! (Score:4, Funny)
Is that due to their mass during launch, or because NASA think their too good to shop at Walmart?
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Re:That's no moon! (Score:5, Funny)
Ah, okay. Must have been a Snap-on starter kit.
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Re:That's no moon! (Score:5, Interesting)
LOL Oh if I only had mod points.
A Snap-on 22 piece ratchet kit is over 500 bucks. Hell a tool box from them is over $300!
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Re:That's no moon! (Score:5, Funny)
100k USD? No biggie, that's like 2000 Euros now.
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Re:That's no moon! (Score:5, Insightful)
I wonder, will she catch any flak for this? Does she get docked salary for letting it slip?
More importantly, why wasn't this extremely expensive bag tethered to something? If it can't be tethered to her for safety reasons, how about a magnetically secured line attached to the work surface?
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Re:That's no moon! (Score:5, Informative)
how about a magnetically secured line attached to the work surface?
You are assuming that there exists a ferromagnetic surface which would attract a magnet. Remember what the ISS is mostly made of.
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Re:That's no moon! (Score:5, Funny)
Remember what the ISS is mostly made of.
Love?
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Re:That's no moon! (Score:5, Funny)
Considering the cost of the ISS and the delays in building it, I'm assuming it's made entirely of unicorn bones.
Thus, not magnetic.
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Re:That's no moon! (Score:5, Funny)
Unicorn bones contain small amounts of neodymium, making them magnetic.
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Re:That's no moon! (Score:5, Funny)
NASA guessed the bag/tools as being worth USD$100,000.00 [tbo.com]...
Still cheaper than Louis Vutton.
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Re:That's no moon! (Score:5, Informative)
Mostly, they do.
From http://www.space.gc.ca/asc/pdf/educator-ecosystem_edu.pdf [space.gc.ca]
In orbit portions of the ISS will be exposed to direct sunlight 16 times per Earth day.
Temperatures on these occasions can climb to over 120 degrees Celsius. The ISS will
also be exposed to complete darkness or lack of radiant energy. Temperatures can
plummet to -100 degrees Celsius. Thus, the internal environment of both spacecraft
and space suit, developed for extravehicular activity, must have an active temperature
regulation system that maintains a narrow range of thermal comfort.
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Re:That's no moon! (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, a woman dropped an expensive toolbag. An organisation comprised predominantly of men oversaw the disintegration of the Space Shuttle Columbia...
If you're keeping score, I think women might be in the lead for some time yet ;)
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Re:That's no moon! (Score:5, Insightful)
Don't forget, this is how it works.
http://www.xkcd.com/385/ [xkcd.com]
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Re:That's no moon! (Score:4, Insightful)
Chill, friend - just a joke, aiming to highlight that it's silly to raise the fact that a woman did it, because men aren't exactly robots :)
Disclaimer: I am a guy and therefore also not a robot.
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Re:That's no moon! (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:That's no moon! (Score:5, Funny)
oh great, the idiot masses of digg and youtube have found slashdot..
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Re:That's no moon! (Score:5, Funny)
Trolling is a slashdot tradition.
You must be new here.
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Re:That's no moon! (Score:5, Funny)
I bet the guys wish they dropped it.Thats some serious bragging rights "I told ya you need a telescope to see my tool."
I don't think that implies what you think it implies.
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Re:That's no moon! (Score:5, Funny)
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Beam me up Scotty (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Beam me up Scotty (Score:5, Funny)
No, in the future it'll come back as an alien intelligence named T'lbg.
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Filmed all the way from Earth? (Score:5, Funny)
And I can't even find a single Phillips screwdriver in my own closet!
Great! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Great! (Score:5, Funny)
I suppose something of this incident will go down in history and become the origin of some common expression like Murphy's Law in the distant future.
They hubbled it up!
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video mirror (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x6QUPZKBRt0 [youtube.com]
Mirrored WMV (Score:4, Funny)
http://spaceweather.com.nyud.net/swpod2008/23nov08/33442.wmv [nyud.net]
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Floating corpses (Score:5, Interesting)
So does that mean if an astronaut got disconnected and floated off, we'd be able to see them orbiting or flying off too? Kind of morbid.
Re:Floating corpses (Score:5, Funny)
Yes, and yes.
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SAFER (Score:4, Informative)
It's not that morbid, though it probably would give a spacewalker a bit of a scare. But in the event that they lose both tethers and float off, they also have the SAFER [space.com] packs to get them back.
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Re:Floating corpses (Score:5, Funny)
However that asshole with the scissors is not.
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NASA Bloopers Tape (Score:5, Insightful)
NASA funniest home videos?
Seriously though, I feel sorry for this woman. One minor slip up and because the media latched onto it this is all she'll ever be remembered for. NASA astronauts risk life and limb and while the humour's good we shouldn't forget the effort and sacrifice they make should not be dismissed lightly.
Re:NASA Bloopers Tape (Score:5, Funny)
One minor slip up and because the media latched onto it this is all she'll ever be remembered for.
"I dropped a toolbag on a spacewalk. But I learned my lesson. And that's why I'll use nothing but Husky brand tethered toolbags, now with lined pockets for those messy grease gun spills."
The possibilities are endless.
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A reason for exploring underground (Score:4, Insightful)
Dark Star (Score:5, Interesting)
Neat! (Score:5, Insightful)
Let's put aside any blame, mistakes, whether the media is being unfair...for just a moment.
Seeing that bag just drift off, only a few feet away from the station and then a few days later we see it pass by in orbit from Earth is just amazing. I'm always impressed with whatever we do in space.
Was it my tax dollars that paid for that lost bag? Still worth the money.
She fumbled, but it's not her fault. (Score:5, Insightful)
She fumbled, in a high-stress enviroment under high-stress circumstances, but it's not her fault. I actually instantly saw the flaw with something/somebody else when I read this the first time.
what in heavens name is up with a space grease gun leaking grease were it's not supposed to? Were does Nasa get these? At the local hardware store for 10 Dollars a piece or what? This stunt actually went quite well. Imagine her not being able to do her job (or get back to the airlock) because a grease gun explodes all over her helmet visor or something simular.
Say what you want, but somewhere some Nasa engineering team has to get back to the drawing table ASAP and design a greasegun that actually works relyably - Nasa style wise. Or something simular with no moving parts at all. Maybe get a vaseline can and a spatula tied to a string or something - that's probably how the russians do it.
I'd actually be super-pissed at gear that goes haywire on me 7 hours into a stressy EVA. I do climbing - imagine your backback shedding mission-critical gear at 300 meters in the vertical or something simular. Multipling that by a thousand hints the scale of issues we're talking about.
Way more people than just the astronaut are responsible here.
The Astronaut's Prayer (Score:5, Funny)
One of the Apollo astronauts once remarked that what they really think about is "Please let me not fuck up.".
Far older than Apollo.... (Score:5, Informative)
The statement "Lord, please don't let me fuck this up" was originally referred to as "The Shepard's Prayer", after the first US astronaut, Alan Shepard. He reportedly "recited" it while on the pad awaiting his Mercury flight, not knowing that his mike was hot, and everyone in launch control was listening in.
Shepard also ended up having to pee in his spacesuit on the pad, because the engineers hadn't considered the effects of having a man lying on his back with his legs elevated for several hours before launch.
The glory days of manned spaceflight...:)
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Re:brighter? (Score:5, Informative)
Timestamp 1: Witnesses as far as 720 kilometers apart reported seeing what looked like a bright meteor falling somewhere on the Saskatchewan-Alberta boundary around 5:30 pm MT Thursday, according to the CBC.
Timestamp 2: Last night, Nov. 22nd, veteran satellite observer Kevin Fetter video-recorded the backpack-sized bag gliding over his backyard observatory in Brockville, Ontario.
So, no.
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Re:brighter? (Score:5, Funny)
timestamp 3: ???
timestamp 4: profit!
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Re:Check out the sexism on the youtube video (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Check out the sexism on the youtube video (Score:5, Insightful)
Your first mistake was reading the comments on a Youtube video.
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Re:A "FETCH" unit (Score:5, Insightful)
It probably would be cheaper just to have the astronauts make sure the bag is continually tethered to something.
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Re:How? (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Send the shuttle to retrieve it (Score:5, Informative)
Simple: when the shuttle's done at the station, detach and intercept the bag in orbit. Voila, $100k saved.
Not a chance. That bag doesn't just float somewhere around the station, it is on an orbital trajectory of its own -
by now probably quite far from the ISS in fact. And unless Heidemarie aimed very carefully, it isn't even in the same
orbital plane. The shuttle doesn't carry enough fuel to do plane transfer maneuvers (that's the main reason why timing is important when launching), and even if it did, it would take a hell of a lot of maneuvering to do a full orbital
realignment - which would probably cost more in fuel alone than those $100k.
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Re:Send the shuttle to retrieve it (Score:5, Informative)
I think you are wrong.
I know I'm not. I've calculated stuff like this before.
The velocity relative to the ISS is a few metres per second at the most.
You'd be surprised how difficult it is to catch up even in those orders of magnitude.
Orbital maneuvering is hard, and very unintutive. NASA had to learn this the hard way:
The early rendez-vous missions assumed it would be possible to fly manual visual approaches once the
target is in sight. Didn't work. Maneuvering out-of-plane is also energetically very expensive.
Because it got a single impulse it will keep coming back once an orbit.
True, the orbits intersect in space. But not in time, due to different excentricity.
The shuttle/ISS will not be at the section point the next time the bag comes along.
I don't think catching it with the shuttle on this mission is impossible.
If the orbital periods have a common integer multiple (unlikely), they could wait and try a very risky
catch-the-bag EVA (exactly one chance) - but they will probably run out of time, air and other
supplies before this would be possible even then.
Just accept it: It's impossible.
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