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Space Science

Space Station & Shuttle Evade Debris 151

Posted by michael from the space-slalom dept.
T.Hobbes writes: "There's an article at the BBC about the shuttle had to take evasive maneuvers to avoid the close (5km) transit of some rocket debris, and how the fuel consumed has cut short the shuttle's stay in orbit by one day. NASA also has an article about it." I know that minor maneuvers are common, but this one seems like a rather major move. Anyone want to bet on how long it will be before we have to establish some sort of clean-up effort in space?
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Space Station & Shuttle Evade Debris More

Space Station & Shuttle Evade Debris

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  • They were moving the ISS, not just the shuttle (Score:5, Informative)

    by Brento ( 26177 ) <brento@@@brentozar...com> on Sunday December 16, 2001 @10:46AM (#2711009) Homepage
    The Slashdot article doesn't make it quite clear enough that they weren't trying to keep the shuttle clear of the debris - they were trying to keep the space station clear of debris. That's why it consumed so much fuel (they had to budge the entire space station 3/4 of a mile.) It's easy to move the shuttle, much harder to use the shuttle as a tugboat.
    • > It's easy to move the shuttle, much harder to use the shuttle as a tugboat.

      Simple question: What happens if they spot a piece of junk heading at them when a shuttle isn't docked?

      Obviously they would have this covered. The options I can think of are:

      • One of the Russian modules has a propultion device, but can it fire when there's stuff docked to its rear end?
      • The Soyuz lifeboat has engines, but does it have enough fuel to haul the station around and still return safely to Earth? Besides, the Soyuz is often docked at right angles to the V-bar, meaning it's engines would just make the station pinwheel.
      • There is often a Progress cargo delivery ship docked, maybe it can tap into the Russian module's fuel and burn it useing its own engines?
      • That's three russian solutions, of which none is sure.
        Other countries must have thought of this I presume. If all relies on getting a space shuttle up there it's just a matter of waiting untill bad weather prevents the shuttle to launch in time
        • That's three russian solutions, of which none is sure.

          What do you mean these solutions are not sure? Are you a technical expert on the matter or just bashing the Russian space technology and expertise?

          If it's the latter one, I'd strongly suggest you consider the fact that Soviet Union/Russia is the only country that managed to maintain a working space station in orbit for decades, provided most of the low-cost heavy lifting for ISS building and is currently edging ahead of NASA and ESA when it comes to commercialising space and good PR.

      • What happens if they spot a piece of junk heading at them when a shuttle isn't docked?
        Whip out that robot arm (assuming it's working), and BATTER UP!

      • Re:They were moving the ISS, not just the shuttle (Score:5, Informative)

        by sohp ( 22984 ) <snewton@@@io...com> on Sunday December 16, 2001 @01:33PM (#2711338) Homepage
        Indeed, one of the roles of the Soyuz lifeboat (and the Progess) is to boost the ISS. Mission managers decided to use the shuttle in order to save consumables on those spacecraft. After all, the shuttle was headed home anyway, but they need the Russian craft for other things for a while.

        As for the Russian modules, their propulsion gear was strictly for boost and initial docking and attitude control until the other modules arrived. The Progress couldn't tap into any residual fuel because there's no piping to hook up (that I know of)

      • Simple question: What happens if they spot a piece of junk heading at them when a shuttle isn't docked?

        The Station uses it's own thrusters. They use the Shuttle's when it's docked to save station fuel. This is pretty much the same reason that they use the Shuttle for the "Re-boost" operations. They'd already done 3 of those this flight, now the emergency maneuvers. I can see why they had to cut the flight a day short.

  • Duh! (Score:3, Funny)

    by Calle Ballz ( 238584 ) on Sunday December 16, 2001 @10:46AM (#2711010) Homepage
    That's what you get when you leave your garbage in orbit! Where'd they think it would go? the moon? Around orbit is just like that place behind your couch where you throw trash, no one sees it but eventually it will become a problem. I dunno what they were thinking.

    • Not as easy as you think (Score:5, Informative)

      by s20451 ( 410424 ) on Sunday December 16, 2001 @10:58AM (#2711033) Journal

      That's what you get when you leave your garbage in orbit! ... I dunno what they were thinking.

      As with most issues in the space program, this is not as simple as it sounds. The debris in question is an old Soviet-era rocket booster, which travels into orbit along with whatever payload it's carrying. Unless some action is taken, it will circle the earth for hundreds of years until the extremely rareified upper atmosphere creates enough drag to bring it down. In order to remove these objects from orbit, you would have to install a retro-rocket system to bring it down on command, which would introduce complexity and cost quite a lot of weight. The debris has to come down somewhere, and if the de-orbiting device malfunctions, it will come down over Chicago rather than some isolated patch of the Pacific. Furthermore, most of the debris that people are worried about are not huge boosters, but tiny rice-grain-sized specs, which are impossible to track and account for.

  • Space.com article (Score:4, Informative)

    by vanadium4761 ( 203839 ) <jason@vallery.net> on Sunday December 16, 2001 @10:56AM (#2711027) Homepage
    There is a more detailed article [space.com] here.

  • "Deadly Litter" (Score:3, Informative)

    by Alrescha ( 50745 ) on Sunday December 16, 2001 @10:57AM (#2711031)
    James White wrote about this problem in 1964.

    I could easily believe that someone wrote about the problem before that.

    Deadly Litter (c) 1964 by James White,
    ISBN 0-345-29640-0

    A.

  • This is cool (Score:1, Funny)

    by alen ( 225700 )
    For some reason this reminds me of the movie Armageddon.

    • Re:This is cool (Score:1, Troll)

      by pinkj ( 521155 )
      'For some reason this reminds me of the movie Armageddon.'

      Why would anyone WANT to be reminded of the movie Armegeddon?
  • Anyone want to bet on how long it will be before we have to establish some sort of clean-up effort in space?

    how long? i'd guess now is an excellent time to start thinking about it. I read there is quite a problem [animatedsoftware.com] already. But like most things, if mankind can figure a way out of it, or better, around it in this instance, I'm sure we will. Then some day something BIG will crash up there, and then all of a sudden people will do something about it (a la airport security)

    • The right answer is *not* to de-orbit the stuff, but to gather it together, and leave it *in* orbit. We've already paid dearly to put the stuff up there, we should start thinking of it as a mine. We won't be smelting the ore for a while, but it is pretty high grade stuff.

  • Discover had an article about this just recently (Score:3, Informative)

    by wfaulk ( 135736 ) on Sunday December 16, 2001 @11:03AM (#2711042) Homepage
    The Shooting Gallery [discover.com]

  • You need funding to clean up space. (Score:3, Flamebait)

    by MongooseCN ( 139203 ) on Sunday December 16, 2001 @11:08AM (#2711049) Homepage
    I'm sure politicians will only realize how much we need to clean up space after a shuttle crew dies from a collision with space debris. I mean right now our money is much better spent on that missle defence system. I mean after Sept 11th it's clearly missles we need to defend against, right?

  • Better orderly mess than messy order (Score:2, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Space junk really isn't that much of an issue since its orderly - Im pretty sure they have known about this object for a long time [years], and since the trajectory and orbit of all known space junk is static, noboby is going to be surprised by flying banana peel. However, when you get more than one object large enough to have gravitaional pull on its own, I suppose the calculations will become more and more complex and you end up having to put up some serious timex watches in stuff you put up there. When that time comes, a small british company has already made a tiny inexpensive cleaning bot for earth-orbiting debris [BBC: http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/sci/tech/newsid_7 97000/797338.stm]
    /penhead
    • Actually it is more like messy order. According to computer simulations, because space litter has almost no predicted entry into an orbit, the orbits they occupy tend to precess and scatter the debris. Because of a lack of tracking, there is no way to know if Story Musgrave's lost torque wrench hurtling through space at 30m/s is about to punch a whole through the habitation module of the ISS. At the same time, in the close vicinity (several hundred km), debris can be detected by either radar on the shuttle, the station, or instruments on various DSN trackers (such as Hubble, or LIDAR-based ISS ground trackers). The main problem is avoidance. You have to first verify the existance of an eminent collision, and then write up an orbital change maneuver plan. You must calculate the exact force you need on the exact vectors to assure that you accelerate in the right direction with the correct delta-v, at the same time considering the estimated time of possible impact with the object.

  • Star wars (Score:2, Funny)

    by Yahiko ( 461616 )
    Star wars was just a coverup for an intergalactic garbage disposal unit!

    Yahiko
  • Cleaning up near earth space would be extrememly difficult and costly. Going out at grabbing just one or two dead satellites or pieces of junk would require a separate mission. Deorbiting large quantities of debris at once would be ideal, but then there is the problem of differentiating between junk and working satellites, as well as the rain of metal through the atmosphere.
  • I think they already avoid any explosion that makes a lot of nontraceable fragments. (The Gorbachev's asymmetric answer to US Star Wars program was reportedly a bunch of asymmetric nuts to be sent to collision with US ICBM). The problem is that the used rockets will orbit the Earth indefinitely. As I know this problem is being solved: during one of shuttle flights it was shown that the tethered satellite tends to induce currents along the tether which gives a lot of electricity and creates drag which lowers the orbit without any need of propellant. You only attach the cable and electrode to every booster and eject it after use (Or, if you like, pump electricity into the cable and obtain the propulsion without propellant).

  • Space Junk (Score:5, Insightful)

    by standards ( 461431 ) on Sunday December 16, 2001 @11:16AM (#2711062)
    The real problem is that space junk leads to more space junk.

    Space junk by itself isn't too bad. It's just some stuff that's floating around Earth's orbit.

    The problem is that this space junk will collide with other space junk, leading to smaller, faster moving pieces of junk. This small, undetectable junk will smack into good equipment, leading to even more space junk. Before you know it, there's a chain reaction, and near earth orbit becomes an unsuitable wasteland of high velocity particles.

    Just what we don't need.

    And trust me, it's one thing to get and send down a spent rocket. It's a bit harder to remove a few thousand small shards of aluminum, paint and ceramic.

    There is an immediate need to de-orbit as much space junk as possbile.
    • The problem is that this space junk will collide with other space junk, leading to smaller, faster moving pieces of junk. This small, undetectable junk will smack into good equipment, leading to even more space junk. Before you know it, there's a chain reaction, and near earth orbit becomes an unsuitable wasteland of high velocity particles.

      This scenario sounds like a certain late-70's video game. We can effectively solve this problem by installing a hyperspace button on every spacecraft. You just have to assign one of the crew members sit near the button at all times and look out for incoming debris.

    • Wow! Doesn that mean we'll get rings, like Saturn? Great!
  • Wonder if they'll be using e-cons to clean it up ;)
  • "Anyone want to bet on how long it will be before we have to establish some sort of clean-up effort in space?"

    Personally, I don't think it is needed for a long time. First of all, more communications will probably be moved down to earth using high-flying aircrafts over longer time, unless somebody (Like the guys who use microwaves and laser to fire stuff into the sky) with a cheaper launch technique succeeds. Secondly, its not actually THAT big a problem, and a clean up effort will most likely be a major undertaking. I bet it's cheaper to protect and move spacecraft away from the trash rather than removing it.

    IF they were to do a cleanup, I bet it would be when space finaly is commericialised, and more spacestations and flights are run. My guess of a timescope? 75-150 years. We can do it today, bu it cost to much, just like normal flight back in the yearly 20th century. Ne technology is being developed that may change all of this. Again, I love the idea of using laser to fire off a craft, imaging a solar powered launch facility using solid-state lasers, cheap, clean and efficent.

    My guess would be using small drones flying around on solar power, just pushing the trash down into the atmosphere.


    Mvh:
    - Knut S.

  • Ya know... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Talisman ( 39902 ) on Sunday December 16, 2001 @11:24AM (#2711076) Homepage
    If they would just mount a frickin' laser beam on the Shuttle, this wouldn't be a problem. They should also mount lasers on the ISS. Anything that makes it more like a Death Star is tax money well spent.

    Talisman
    • NASA has examined using the Star Wars project (the Raegan one, not the Lucas one) to have orbiting lasers just powerful enough to burn up small (bolt-sized) debris.

      The problem they currently face with that is detection. When a chicken Mc-Nugget -sized debris (actually, chicken Mc-Nugget are debris by themselves) is coming at you at 50 000kph, it's hard to detect it before it hits you.

      And to detect them long enough for a relatively weak laser (unlike Lucas') to burn them is another problem.
      • Also, I think you'd have to worry about what would happen after vaporization: I mean, in the atmosphere, once something's vaporized, it'll fall to the ground as a new flavor of dirt, but in space wouldn't this just lead to gajillions of superfast droplets as the target recondensed?
        • Do you really need to vaporize it? If you hit as its coming towards the laser would it be possible the take off enough forward velocity that it would drop into a low enough orbit to be affected by enough atmospheric drag to decay?

          It would seems with things the size of bolts, straps, gloves, torque wrenches, etc that you could safely depend on them burning up in the atmosphere instead of crashing into an inhabited area.

  • Space Invaders (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Alien54 ( 180860 ) on Sunday December 16, 2001 @11:24AM (#2711080) Journal
    We're going to have to get autocontrolled space going robots running from orbit, complete with little nets or something to cath the debris and knock the stuff out of orbit to burn up on re-entry. We wouldn't want to use completely hard projectiles because of the possible shrapnel. We want to avoid the "golden BB" effect, where a tiny bit of debris knocks out a 100 million dolar piece of equipment.

    Not quite space invaders, but it would give a career path for alot of those video gamers out there.p.Although, gamers would tear their hair out trying to get used to the inherent latency of a spacecraft flying from orbit.

    • I would use a modified form of that liquid styrofoam to operate in low pressure environments. Then the bot could build a "net" of the styrofoam and when it feels he mass is at a predefined point or x time has passed it would jettison it off towards the atmosphere to burn up and build a new net without requiring a reentry and re-equipment with a new net.
      • I would use a modified form of that liquid styrofoam to operate in low pressure environments

        Well, anything that had enough surfac area/sail area would slow down fast as it is.

        Otherwise you need to either hit it with something that would slow it down substantially, or else you go and scoop it up. Things like errant gloves, wrenches, Nuts, bolts, etc.

        then you could take the bag and throw that towards the earth to burn up


    • Actually, we could use those nifty ion drives (like on Deep Space 1) and some really good AI to push much of the larger debris back into the atmosphere.
  • Why not use the larger pieces of space junk as target practice for the missle defense shield that Bush is after? Test the system while destroying the junk.

  • I thought there was a space cleanup project (Score:4, Informative)

    by Lumpy ( 12016 ) on Sunday December 16, 2001 @11:38AM (#2711093) Homepage
    back in the late 90's nasa was working with the generation of aerogels to make a "space sponge" of a sorts. a huge frame holding a cube of aerogel inside to basically place in a low orbit, allow it to "sweep" for a while until it starts to gain a certain amount of damage and then de-orbit it.

    I remember a huge segment on it from the show "beyond 2000" (the best tv show discovery ever had, and the morons cancelled it replacing it with a ton of animal crap)
    • (the best tv show discovery ever had, and the morons cancelled it replacing it with a ton of animal crap)


      INCORRECT! The best show Discovery ever had (and still has) is "Walking with Prehistoric Beasts."

      If you haven't walked with the beasts, you haven't lived.

  • Deflectors (Score:2, Flamebait)

    by BlueCoder ( 223005 )
    I would have thought that NASA and the US government would have designed space deflectors by now. Thrusting robots that deflect debris into the atmosphere or collect it depending on the circumstances.

    It's shocking that the space industry is so affected by simple debris. It's a wonder one of the middle eastern countries have not tried to build orbital rockets whose only purpose is to blow up when they get there. They have lots of money and their engineers are not incompetent. One properly armed missle could create a whole cascade effect. It's would totally devistate our economy and take out spy and targeting satelites all at once. There might be secret lasers or particle cannons in space that might be able to hit rockets but they could always say they are launching a satelite. Scary how vulnerable we are.

    • sorry our economy would survive well without sattelites. besides, you'd have to create one helluva(tm) metal shard cloud to get the geosync birds that are over 25,000 KM away remember that the ISS is less than 200 miles up. and shuttle missions rarely go higher than that.

    • It's a wonder one of the middle eastern countries have not tried to build orbital rockets whose only purpose is to blow up when they get there. They have lots of money and their engineers are not incompetent. One properly armed missle could create a whole cascade effect. It's would totally devistate our economy and take out spy and targeting satelites all at once.

      There's several problems with this. One is just how vast space is. Even in a low earth orbit you are talking about distances that are much larger than on the Earth. Suppose you did turn a whole rocket into debris. Most of the debris from the explosion would immediately deorbit to the Earth. The fraction of the original mass which stayed up would have to spread out enough to cover a good-sized area, or else it would present such a small target that the chance of it hitting anything would be extremely small. Even when the debris is out there, it would be very likely to miss any spacecraft, unless you sent up a few dozen of these things.

      The second, major issue is cost. I did a little searching and found here [nasa.gov] that launches cost around $20,000 per pound for a 400 pound launch. That means that the entire 400 pound payload would cost around $8 million.

      Now, with the World Trade Center disaster as an example you can see that far more damage could be done far more inexpensively. For an investment which was probably in the several hundred thousand dollar range (including food, housing, training, travel, of all the terrorists), they were able to kill 5,000 people, cause damage which is in the billions, and disturb an entire world. If they sent up 400 pounds worth of shrapnel they might eventually take out a satellite or spacecraft and cause damage in the few hundred million, along with 4 or 5 lives - all for the cost of $8 million a shot (assuming that one is enough). Which choice would you make? :)

  • natural debris (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Veteran ( 203989 ) on Sunday December 16, 2001 @11:45AM (#2711104)
    By far the biggest problem with collision in space comes from micro meteorites. The formula for the quantity of meteors of a given size is that the number of meteors is inversely proportional to the mass of the meteor. If there are 1000 1 Km asteroids in near earth orbit there would be about one million 100 meter asteroids. (Remember the mass of a sphere is proportional to the cube of its diameter.) That means that there are about a billion 10 meter rocks in near earth orbit - a trillion 1 meter rocks, 10 to the 15th 10 cm rocks, 10 to the 18th 1 cm rocks etc.

    One of the problems that we humans have is over estimating our importance in the cosmic sphere - the universe hardly notices us - indeed the Earth hardly notices us; from low earth orbit it is very difficult to see anything that man has done on the Earth.

    The space station - because of its size - has about 1/2 lb of drag due to the nascent atmosphere 250 miles up. This drag is why experiments in the station are referred to as "micro gravity" instead of "zero g"; there is a tiny gravitational field due to the drag. One of the reasons for the periodic shuttle trips is to reboost the space station to make up for the lost velocity from the residual drag.
    • the funny part was that spacelab was only 100 miles up and it maintained it's own orbit (it had it's own thrusters) and Mir wasn't much higher. the only required missions were resupply and refuel. It has always blown my mind that the ISS doesnt have any maneuver capability, and why it wasn't placed in a geosync or a higher circular orbit.... oh well, maybe someday the governments of this planet will remove their heads from their butts and start spending real money on space research and platforms.

      • Re:natural debris (Score:4, Informative)

        by FTL ( 112112 ) <slashdot@neil.fras[ ]name ['er.' in gap]> on Sunday December 16, 2001 @12:25PM (#2711208) Homepage
        > It has always blown my mind that the ISS doesnt have any maneuver capability,

        It most certainly does [nasa.gov]. Check your facts.

        > and why it wasn't placed in a geosync

        Geosync is the most crowded orbital position we have. This is the last place you want to be if you are trying to avoid junk. Check your facts.

        > or a higher circular orbit.

        As it stands the shuttle is strained to the limit to get to the station. Infact Columbia (the heaviest of the four shuttles) can't reach the station [space.com] where it is. Move it any higher, and you wouldn't be able to get to it. Check your facts.

        • Re:natural debris (Score:2, Insightful)

          by Scott Ransom ( 6419 )
          > Geosync is the most crowded orbital position we have.
          > This is the last place you want to be if you are trying to avoid junk.
          > Check your facts.

          Geosync may be crowded, but the space junk problem is not nearly as severe up there. There are a couple reasons why:

          1. The density of small non-trackable debris (i.e. rivets, bolts, metal pieces from booster separation) is _much_ lower than in low-Earth orbit. The small debris causing events happen much lower -- possibly enroute to Geosync.

          2. The distribution of relative velocites between spacecraft is much narrower (and hence better for survivability) since the purpose of Geosync is to effectively "park" a spacecraft over a fixed point on the equator. So everything is travelling in pretty much the same direction at the same velocity. In low-Earth orbit there is crap flying every which way.

        • Re:natural debris (Score:2, Insightful)

          by Schemer ( 717 )

          > As it stands the shuttle is strained to the limit to get to the station. Infact Columbia (the heaviest of the four shuttles) can't reach the station [space.com] where it is. Move it any higher, and you wouldn't be able to get to it. Check your facts.

          Actually, the ISS's original planned orbit would have allowed all of the shuttles to reach it, and they would have been able to carry much more cargo than they can now. When russia became involved in ISS's construction, the orbit of the system was changed so that Russia's weaker rockets could barely reach it. The problem is that the final orbit is not an optimal orbit for the shuttle and as a result they can't carry as big of a load, and columbia can barly make it at all.

        • Re:natural debris (Score:3, Informative)

          by DerekLyons ( 302214 )
          As it stands the shuttle is strained to the limit to get to the station. Infact Columbia (the heaviest of the four shuttles) can't reach the station [space.com] where it is. Move it any higher, and you wouldn't be able to get to it.

          Height is not the problem at all, Columbia can easily reach the current altitude of the ISS. What Columbia can't easily do is reach the orbit of the ISS. The two sound the same, but they aren't really. To explain: (highly simplified)

          A given booster can launch it's maximum weight to a given altitude launching at 0 degrees inclination, that is due East. (In the same plane as the Equator.) At that angle the booster gets the maximum help from the Earth's spin. As the angle of inclination increases (or decreases) the help from the Earth's spin goes down, and so does the payload to a given altitude. Minimum payload to a given altitude occurs at +/- 180 degrees, or due West. (You have to 'slow down' relative to the Earth before 'speeding up' to orbital velocity.)

          The ISS is in a 52 degree orbit so that the Russians can reach it from their launch sites. The orbits they can reach are limited because of where the stages of the booster will drop early in the flight. Low inclinations require either dropping the stages on China, or choosing trajectories that require so much booster energy that useful payload drops dramatically. Since the Russian modules had to be launched more-or-less fully equipped, ISS had to be in an orbit they could effectively reach, thus causing the US to accept a major payload hit.

          After her latest overhaul Columbia can in fact reach the station with a minimal payload. (Which is even specified in the article [space.com] you referenced.) Check your facts.

          Geosync is the most crowded orbital position we have. This is the last place you want to be if you are trying to avoid junk.

          Geosync is crowded because for a given 'slot' (a chunk of orbit that can see directly a specific spot on the ground) there is a lot of competition. Also while there are a number of dead sattelites in the vicinity, there is almost no booster stages, debris from breakups, or 'lost' hardware. In fact geosync is highly desireable for debris avoidance because the relative velocities and absolute debris density are much lower. Check your facts.
      • You can't have a lab (staffed by humans) in geosync without some sort of shielding.

        The ISS is inside Earth's magnetosphere, so it's largely protected from the nasty particles the Sun, etc., heave at us.

        MJC

  • Suggestion (Score:2, Funny)

    by Digitalia ( 127982 )
    Where's Martha Stewart when you need her? Slap her on a shuttle and send her uip to orbit. Then you'll solve to of our problems at once.

  • Major Threat (Score:1, Redundant)

    by thebabelfish ( 213456 )
    The most threatening of space junk is that which is not large enough to detect and manuever around, but not small enough to not worry about. This range holds lots of potentially dangerous objects that could puncture the outside of spacecraft. The problem is collecting and removing most of these objects from orbit.

    On a side note, now that the ISS is higher, how is it's visibility from earth affected (if any) and will it stay at its new altitude (if so, for how long)?

    Just one more note, Heaven's Above [heavens-above.com] is a great resource for tracking satellites and other close to home astronomical events (such as Iridium flares [heavens-above.com]).

  • Why? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by dangermouse ( 2242 ) on Sunday December 16, 2001 @12:45PM (#2711246) Homepage
    Why is a five-kilometer clearance not good enough? Is it that the people tracking the two objects weren't certain enough of their calculations, or that it was likely something would alter the course of the rocket fragment? How far away from that 5km pass-by were the two objects when the call was made?

    Just curious.

    • Good question. Maybe they're afraid smaller parts have separated from the big piece of debris, and that these fragments are too small to detect from earth ?
    • Maybe they aren't sure whether they converted to metric or not.

      :)
    • We tend to think of orbits as being circular and completely predictable. In theory this is true. In practice the orbit is affected by solar effects, magnetic effects on the vehicle (depends on the shape and materials of the vehicle), perturbations by the moon, saturn, the sun, the non spherical nature of the earths gravity field, etc. etc.

      In practice you can't predict the orbit exactly, so the rules say that if the vehicle is coming within a certain distance (a few miles), then measures have to be taken, ranging from moving the vehicle to piling into the escape vehicle, depending on the predicted distance.
    • after NASA has learned its lesson on metric vs imperial units on that mars mission that got lost, i can just see it... "5km? how much is that? ...Better move it just in case."
  • when the shuttle isn't there to move the ISS out of harm's way? Would the ISS have been destroyed had the shuttle not moved it? Couldn't something like this happen again, and if so, how are they going to prevent debris from damaging or destroying the ISS?
  • Space junk caused the death of several astro-nuts, back 21 years ago [simplenet.com]... :) :) :)

  • ...what? (Score:2, Funny)

    by Transcendent ( 204992 )
    evasive maneuvers?? Umm... it should be defensive maneuvers, unless it actually attacked the debris at the same time... which uh... i dont think they did...

  • There was an article on this in discover magazine (Score:3, Informative)

    by KnightElite ( 532586 ) on Sunday December 16, 2001 @01:48PM (#2711379) Homepage
    Apparently, NASA is working on setting up cleaning efforts, and all the space agencies have agreed not to drop garbage off in space anymore. NASA is working on making their hulls more micro-meteorite proof due to all the floating garbage. To test new hull designs, they have the four most powerful guns in the world, which shoot pea sized bullets at various types of hull designs, at 15 000 m/s. That's in the latest issue of discover.
  • For the most part collisions with space junk isn't quite as big a problem asd you'd think. The reason is in order to have a stable orbit at a certain altitude the object must have a certain velocity (which wold be the same for all other objects at that altidude) as a result the only time a near collision like this could happen is if the debris happens to have an intersecting orbit which is still extremely unlikely. Even in this case the debris would probably not have collided if it hadn't been moved, it was just a percautionary measure. Still does anyone know if there are plans for manouvering rockets on the completed ISS?
  • BBC has this article [bbc.co.uk] about a laser "broom" being tested for use on ISS that could divert or destroy some debrit. Here is an exerpt from the article:
    ... there are some fragments about the size of a tennis ball which are big enough to pierce a spacecraft but too small to monitor easily. These intermediate bits of space junk are the target of Nasa's new laser space broom. This is a ground-based system that can locate and destroy or divert these fragments.
    -JK
  • OK, this is America, we got nukes. so many nukes as a matter of fact that we are taking them apart and burying them, why not just put on the best 4th of July firework display ever, and, as an added bonus, vaporise a buttload of space junk? Aside from the massive EMP that would happen, would nukes really work at getting rid of some of the larger peices of junk? What about the blast pushing sattelite out of their orbits? Sounds like fun anyway....
    • You mean besides a couple international treaties that forbid nuclear detonations in space?

      The little EMP event you mention would be quite damaging. Take a look at every electronic device around your home. (Including your car). Now imagine it as a paperweight.
  • Anyone out there remember the TV show from the 70's (around the time of Star Wars) called Quark, with (I think) Richard Benjimin. (http://www.tvparty.com/recquark.html) He flew a intergalactic garbage scow around and collected garbage. What a show....

    -Bill
  • They should just blast it all into the sun and burn it.
  • They should just blast all the junk into the sun.
  • I would assume that 90% of the junk in space is small metalic parts right? So why not put up a satalite a few hundred k's in front of the ISS, with a powerfull electromagnet and a very strong hull? If the magnet was strong enough, it would pull in a lot of the small parts, which would no longer be a threat. That would then just leave the larger pieces of debris, some of which could be thrown out of orbit by the magnet, and the rest would be a lot easier to dodge.
    • What about the ones small enough to be significantly deflected towards the magnet but just big enough not to be deflected all the way into the magnet+shield. For objects that size aren't you *attracting* them towards the station. If you were careful, and switched it off when you saw an object that size coming, it might work.
  • Like the bbc article says the shuttle used it's thusters (on a series of small burns that lasted about 20 mins) to push the station and thus aviod comming within 3 miles of a I think the second or third stage of a Soviet rocket that was launched in the 70's.

    On any other given day when the shuttle leaves the station they fly a lap around the station (to check it out and take photos.)

    I was watching this on Nasa TV and I heard that at first (because they where using fuel on the burn to move the station) the shuttle was only going to do a 1/4 lap around the station, But after the bean counters on the ground re-did the maths they mannage to pull out a half lap around the station (if the shuttle crew loose a hour of their off duty time and sleep with the shuttle pointed towards the stars..)

    There is some US agency that monitors space junk I think their name is "space command" (I think the same mob who montors missile launches) they issue warnings when something comes within a 40 mile box of the station.
  • Do as Fry suggests and fire junk at junk

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