Hubble Repair Mission At Risk 224
MollyB writes "According to Wired, the recent collision of satellites may put the Atlantis shuttle mission to repair Hubble in the 'unacceptable risk' status:
'The spectacular collision between two satellites on Feb. 10 could make the shuttle mission to fix the Hubble Space Telescope too risky to attempt. Before the collision, space junk problems had already upped the Hubble mission's risk of a "catastrophic impact" beyond NASA's usual limits, Nature's Geoff Brumfiel reported today, and now the problem will be worse. Mark Matney, an orbital debris specialist at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas told the publication that even before the collision, the risk of an impact was 1 in 185, which was "uncomfortably close to unacceptable levels" and the satellite collision "is only going to add on to that."'"
hmm. (Score:5, Interesting)
we were discussing the debris problem at work over coffee the other day.
we were trying to find solutions to it in our non-expert fashion.
sadly the best we could come up with were:
(1) putting a impact shield around spacecraft - but the kind of impact speeds we are talking about probably makes this uneconomical as the shield would need to be massive.
(2) some kind of automated space cleaner that went around removing debris - but we had no idea how that could possibly work or be designed
(3) vastly improved tracking capabilities so we could avoid the worst areas and steer around them
(4) pre-emptive removal of dead satalites (no, not shooting them down from earth - attaching small moters to send them into the atmosphere) - maybe steering them into a declining orbit as the last thing they do before swithing them off
(5) just abandoning the whole outer space game anyhow and using a vast fiber optic ring on the surface for communication needs
there were probably other ideas that we came up with that I cannot remember, but this might get some comments/advice/derision.
but we all agreed, this problem will only get worse. and choosing different orbit altitudes only delays confronting the issue - but might be cheaper in the short term.
Re:hmm. (Score:5, Insightful)
putting a impact shield around spacecraft - but the kind of impact speeds we are talking about probably makes this uneconomical as the shield would need to be massive.
The spacecraft would have trouble getting off the ground. That's even worse than uneconomical.
some kind of automated space cleaner that went around removing debris - but we had no idea how that could possibly work or be designed
The problem with this is - if that "cleaner" gets hit by debris, you've just added to the problem instead of reducing it.
pre-emptive removal of dead satalites (no, not shooting them down from earth - attaching small moters to send them into the atmosphere) - maybe steering them into a declining orbit as the last thing they do before swithing them off
That would have been a way to keep the problem in check, and it's being done with some satellites. But usually whoever puts satellites up there is too cheap to worry about disposal, since by the time it becomes a problem, they're most likely not around anymore and don't have to worry. Yay, just let the following generations clean up the crap, just like with everything else.
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putting a impact shield around spacecraft - but the kind of impact speeds we are talking about probably makes this uneconomical as the shield would need to be massive.
The spacecraft would have trouble getting off the ground. That's even worse than uneconomical.
Here's a thought. What if each spacecraft did not lug a big old shield up into orbit. What if we build an orbiting "overcoat" which had the necessary shielding and a space inside to accomodate the spacecraft. Then you launch as light as you can and do
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And how many years will it take to lug the shield up there and build it?
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Here's a thought. What if each spacecraft did not lug a big old shield up into orbit. What if we build an orbiting "overcoat" which had the necessary shielding and a space inside to accomodate the spacecraft.
And that overcoat is built by hauling material from the earth into space (with every transport flight being exposed to the very risk that now jeopardises the Hubble repair mission), putting it together there (with those unlucky astronauts who have to do this being exposed to the very risk that now jeopardises the Hubble repair mission), to then haul up the actual spacecraft (with that transport flight being exposed to the very risk that now jeopardises the Hubble repair mission).
You are not, by chance, an accountant, a corporate lawyer or a politician?
Some people choose to sleep with their pants on because they are reluctant to get out of bed in the morning and suffer cold legs.
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NASA has been kicking around the idea of a Space Tug and space vacuum cleaner. The cleaner would be a satellite that has some kind of sticky foam outer shell that will collect the small stuff.
Re:hmm. (Score:4, Interesting)
Agreed. If you made some kind of inflatable aerogel or foam wall and put it into orbit then it would be bashed by debris, which would slow the debris down somewhat and speed their re-entry. The foam would have booster rockets to keep it in orbit (and keep it out of the way of active satellites). When those boosters run out of fuel, or something causes them to fail, then the huge mass of foam would rapidly deorbit since it would have a high drag:mass ratio.
You could even put the foam in retrograde orbit if you really wanted to slow down debris, although this might make it harder to keep out of the way of active satellites.
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Automated space cleaner... Perhaps a satellite that's solar powered and uses an electromagnet to repel pieces into the atmosphere? Although I suppose that would push it out of orbit... Maybe if there's enough air it could compress some and then use it as a jet to keep in orbit...
Planetes anyone? One of my favorites.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetes [wikipedia.org]
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Re:hmm. (Score:4, Interesting)
As opposed to the fuel it's going to take to have the various other functional satellites, shuttles, and the station dodge all the time?
One idea I saw was to use an aerogel, that really sparse foam, to catch things. Well, set them closer to the deorbital path.
The idea is that the foam is so light that the wrench or whatever that hits it doesn't break up, the foam doesn't break up, so there's no additional fragments. Meanwhile, if you've set the orbit up right, the foam slows the debris down a tad, speeding up the time it'll take to hit atmosphere.
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One idea I saw was to use an aerogel, that really sparse foam, to catch things. Well, set them closer to the deorbital path.
The idea is that the foam is so light that the wrench or whatever that hits it doesn't break up, the foam doesn't break up, so there's no additional fragments. Meanwhile, if you've set the orbit up right, the foam slows the debris down a tad, speeding up the time it'll take to hit atmosphere.
Didn't we use something like this to catch dust from a comet tail?
On a larger scale, it might clean part of an orbit. (I hope it is possible to clean out an orbit, because just waiting for junk to deorbit is going to be really impractical once space travel and the debris it will inevitably produce increase.)
And why doesn't Netflix have Planetes? I've been interested in watching it for years.
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Or just launch some bombs and detonate them in orbit. Make sure the blast radius is large enough to either force the surrounding debris along with the debris generated by the bomb out of orbit or into the atmosphere.
Two points:
1. Blast radii of bombs are small (that includes nuclear ones).
2. Space is big.
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Wouldn't work, there's no atmosphere in space so bombs dont make explosions like they do in an atmosphere. It's jsut a big pulse of electricity, certainly anything near it would be vapourized but they would have to be REAL close otherwise they would just heat up and melt a bit. On top of that there would be a nice big EMP which would make any country beneath the bomb very upset.
Re:hmm. (Score:4, Insightful)
1) - there is moderately workable impact shielding developed for satellites/space craft which consists of plates separated by gaps which spread out the kinetic energy of debris and has been proven effective against small impacts.
2) "space cleaning" could easily be done by deploying some large engineered dragnet style objects into the path of the debris. Obviously careful engineering would have to be used to assure collisions dont cause pieces to splash from the dragnet, but I think its quite doable.
3) we already track space debris down to very small levels. Currently nasa have maps of these pieces, down to the size of a screw if I remember correctly.
4) this is often done already, at least by government agencies. Private companies are another matter, but i've never heard of a private satellite going completely out of use.
5) we may as well just nuke it all now if we don't establish extra-terrestrial colonies. Colonization of space is the next logical step for a species which develops intelligence, and if we don't continue down that path we are a dead-end branch waiting to be pruned from the tree of life.
Re:hmm. (Score:4, Funny)
we already track space debris down to very small levels. Currently nasa have maps of these pieces, down to the size of a screw if I remember correctly.
Manually.
Yeah, Michael Bay films are not a good indicator of military capabilities either.
Last paragraph is rubbish (Score:5, Interesting)
Before the troll mods start up, please let me say I'm not objecting to exploring the Solar System in the slightest (in fact I think it's far more useful than the LHC). I am pointing out that your justification makes no scientific sense.
Re:Last paragraph is rubbish (Score:4, Insightful)
If we learn to live in our existing environment without making it unusable, and adapt to its changes, we've succeeded.
The current environment is transitory. And eventually over geological time, it will change in a way that cannot be adapted to. Plus, it's worth noting that most species (including humans) that exist now do so precisely because they have repeatedly expanded their range.
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So, fine, seek t
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Plus, it's worth noting that most species (including humans) that exist now do so precisely because they have repeatedly expanded their range.
However, when our ancestors were capable of adapting to survive the KT event, they were tiny little shrew-like creatures. And when our ancestors were capable of adapting to survive the big extinction 250M years ago, they were shrimps. In order to survive a global extinction level event such as a reeeeally big asteroid impact, we have to get off of this rock. In the long run, we as a species have already failed to survive because we are too specialised to quickly adapt to the inevitable forthcoming sudden, m
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Frankly, I don't see any of the major extinction events of the geological past being something the human race couldn't survive.
I would generally tend to agree—however, it is very important to make the distinction between the human race and human civilization.
Dan Aris
Re:Last paragraph is rubbish (Score:5, Insightful)
Living in better balance with our environment and within our resources will not save us from a space rock or plague, off-world colonies will, and that's my point.
The main evolutionary trait of human beings is technology, and we are in a unique position to do this, which would set us on the road to the eventually disentanglement of our survival with that of one small planet.
If we fail to do this, then a global catastrophe will eventually happen which outstrips our technology and render us extinct.
Except that (Score:5, Interesting)
Research on Earth into dealing with external threats such as infalling asteroids or comets, dealing with diseases, dealing with our own inbuilt tendency to commit genocide, is far cheaper and more likely to pay dividends. Let's protect ourselves from disease and space rocks first, then we will be demonstrating our adaptability and survival skills. Running for the hills is monkey behavior, dealing with the predators may be what made us human in the first place. After all, we could realistically have a basic comet and asteroid shield by 2030.
I repeat: the idea of space colonies is currently not even science fiction, it's religion. Which was my original point.
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With respect, while you make som
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Will the inhabitants of those "off-world colonies" survive? We are far less likely to adapt to their conditions.
Exactly. We have spent the last several millennium finding our own balance, a genetic war if you will, against pathogens and other animals to establish our dominance in this sphere. There is no reason to suppose that we will conquer another world with ease even if it is filled with 'lesser' forms of life.
Re:Last paragraph is rubbish (Score:5, Insightful)
An earth devastated by an asteroid is still a much more friendly place to live on then either Moon or Mars. Self sustaining off-world colonies won't happen for many many years to come.
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Especially with *that* attitude!
An earth devastated by an asteroid is still a much more friendly place to live on then either Moon or Mars. Self sustaining off-world colonies won't happen for many many years to come.
Re:Last paragraph is rubbish (Score:4, Interesting)
If we fail to do this, then a global catastrophe will eventually happen which outstrips our technology and render us extinct.
So?
Honestly I could not care less. Not trying to troll, I really don't see an issue here. Humans have been around for some 200,000 years. Nice, but that is not exactly a long time span. Dinosaurs were around for more than 160 million years - 160,000,000, you notice the difference? And they still vanished. Humanity as a whole is quite insignificant, one amongst an uncountable mass of life forms in this planet, outlived (by time of existence, not concurrency) by most other species.
Why does everyone believe that we should be destined to walk this universe forever? Sorry, folks, hate to break it to you: The odds of that are damningly slim.
Big deal. By my estimation one of the following will have occurred well before our earth evolves to a point where living conditions will not allow us to adapt anymore:
I am really surprised, and somewhat concerned here. Supposedly /.'s target group should predominantly consist of engineers, scientists and generally geeks and nerds - people who rely on common sense and logic to make a living. (Not counting those working for Microsoft or Sun. Those have somehow mastered the forbidden art of producing systematically structured chaos.)
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Because we can ;-)
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That's not a logically attitude, it's a negative and defeatist attitude.
The scripting language I used to to code a website last week will likely be obsolete in a decade or so, so I don't know why I even bothered writing it in the first place. I should probably have just saved myself the trouble and watched TV all day instead of spending a couple of hours writing in a doomed computer language.
A building can't realistically be expected to last forever, so why do we bother with structural engineering, or safet
Spreading the seeds (Score:5, Insightful)
The idea that we must colonise space to validate our existence is a religion, not science.
The way I look at it, we are the reproductive system for the entire biosphere. If we don't colonize other planets around different stars (let alone other rocks around this one) then all of Gaia* has failed, not just one little species.
* Please note I do not actually personify "Gaia", I just use it as a convenient and poetic label for the entire interconnected biosphere.
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The way I look at it, we are the reproductive system for the entire biosphere.
You know, I think this is a very apt comparison.
Like reproducive organs, especially the testes mammals, we enact extensive changes on the whole planet; not all of which are beneficial. Yet, we're the one big hope for reproduction; so almost ANYTHING is worth it. If we do relocated, odds are we'll take a big chunk of the rest of the biosphere with us.
After that, it breaks down a bit; Gaia is neither male or female. ;)
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If we learn to live in our existing environment without making it unusable, and adapt to its changes, we've succeeded.
We've only succeeded in continuing our dependence on something that the fossil record show isn't dependable. Add into it our own lack of dependability and we've got a major problem.
The idea that we must colonise space to validate our existence is a religion, not science.
Not to validate, just to extend and guarantee. We've spread from Africa and put ourselves into every place and biome on the earth, making it so that a catastr
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You don't understand the Theory of Evolution. There is NO "next logical step" for a species which develops intelligence, and there is NO reason why not colonising space makes us a "dead end branch". As the late, great Jay Gould has pointed out, the main form of life on Earth (by biomass and by effect on the planet) is now, and has been for a very long time, bacteria. Bacteria achieve great adaptability without intelligence.
Eventually, even the bacteria will go extinct without a space program.
It won't be tom
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It depends on the time scale. Yes we WILL be a dead end unless we leave the Earth but we have a billion years (more or less) before we are forced to leave. So if we explore space now or wait 10,000 years it makes little difference. On the cosmic scale 10,000 years is "nothing".
We will eventually learn to live on Earth in a sustainable, stable way.
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Reading the article you linked:
Did anybody consider developing the Whipple Shield to "expand" on deployment? Store the layers tightly packed, then space the layers apart either mechanically or using some kind of compressed filler-material once the payload is deployed.
The laminated nature of the hull would provide additional benefits to pressurised, manned payloads, since it wo
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Are you kidding? There are hundreds of dead telecom and remote sensing spacecraft in orbit.
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The best idea I've come up with would be to send a cannister into the path of the debris to be removed at a slightly lower relative velocity. This device would then open, releasing a huge cloud of rapidly expanding resinous foam (think of the canned stuff you use to fill holes in the wall). The debris would then impact and b
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The best idea that I've heard about is the "laser broom". Basically big ground based lasers that shine up into space and hit orbiting junk with enough energy that they start to ablate. As the material ablates from the pieces, a small amount of thrust would be created, which would alter the pieces' orbits and eventually cause them to reenter the atmosphere and burn up.
It doesn't require putting any new material up into orbit, so you're not potentially creating even more matter up there to deal with. I think
Re:hmm. (Score:5, Interesting)
The space debris problem (Score:4, Insightful)
(5) just abandoning the whole outer space game anyhow and using a vast fiber optic ring on the surface for communication needs
The real problem here is that we're wasting *vast* amounts of orbital space with competing projects that don't share information with each other. There's more than plenty of room for *one* satellite network. But every little war-happy industrialized nation and every communications company and mapping company, etc., needs their own personal network clogging the sky.
Until we, as a species, get a little better at this "cooperation" thing and stop with the in-fighting, the debris field is just going to get worse and make space exploration difficult. (That might even be a good thing for any neighbors we might have.)
Sadly, I don't foresee this happening any time soon.
LHC (Score:3, Funny)
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(2) some kind of automated space cleaner that went around removing debris - but we had no idea how that could possibly work or be designed
Put a gyroscope in a Roomba [irobot.com]?
more power! (Score:2)
You have to turn the debris to gas.
A laser really is the best idea.
Same orbit? (Score:2)
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The problem isn't that the debris might be heading to Hubble's orbit. The problem is that the debris cloud is between us and Hubble, and it's getting larger.
There was an SF author, probably Asimov, who wrote how mankind might become trapped on the planet because of the ever increasing debris field. Over time, all that debris will flatten into a ring, but that will take millions of years.
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The problem isn't that the debris might be heading to Hubble's orbit. The problem is that the debris cloud is between us and Hubble, and it's getting larger.
No, Hubble is below the orbit that the satellites collided in by about 150Km.
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The two satellites were, and the cores and fragments visible to amateurs remain, respectably clear of Hubble's orbit.
For people not aware; the satellites that collided were on the low end of LEO. Hubble is considerably higher.
although it would free up one more shuttle flight with minimal cost to re-assign to the ISS.
From what I remember, the ISS is lower than the Hubble; wouldn't the risks be very similar for either mission?
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For people not aware; the satellites that collided were on the low end of LEO. Hubble is considerably higher.
No the satellite collision happened in upper LEO, not lower. Both Hubble and the space station are below the collision orbit.
Hubble is at 560Km, the space station is at 350Km and the collision was at 705Km.
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No, it's not the end (Score:2, Informative)
Firstly, Hubble is working fine. Secondly, FTA "NASA spokeswoman, Beth Dickey, would not specifically comment on whether or not the collision had created elevated risk for the Hubble repair mission.
"What we've told everyone is that there is an elevated risk to virtually any satellite in low-earth orbit," Dickey said. "As far as NASA's assets are concerned, that risk is considered to be very small. I have not seen or heard anything that would lead me to think differently."
Re:No, it's not the end (Score:5, Informative)
Firstly, Hubble is working fine.
Eh, no. Its practically dead. Thats why every delay to this service mission is so critical - if another couple of gyros go, it won't even be able to orient itself well enough to allow the astronauts to get up close. As it is, most of its main instruments are currently out of action.
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Eh, no. Its practically dead. Thats why every delay to this service mission is so critical - if another couple of gyros go, it won't even be able to orient itself well enough to allow the astronauts to get up close. As it is, most of its main instruments are currently out of action.
Well if Griffin didn't cancel the robotic repair mission that was not only planned but mostly built and tested, it would have been repaired by now.
Re:No, it's not the end (Score:4, Interesting)
In August 2004, O'Keefe requested the Goddard Space Flight Center to prepare a detailed proposal for a robotic service mission. These plans were later canceled, the robotic mission being described as "not feasible [washingtonpost.com]".
Just goes to show you cannot believe everything you read.
In reality, the robotic system was in manufacturing when it was 'canceled'. Goddard continued to fund a scaled back Hubble repair, but only a demo using a mockup robot and the hardware in Goddards full scale Hubble simulation labs. The demos finished as planned and were a complete success. Many of the operations were shown to perform better with robotics than with astronauts (like sliding out the instrument trays).
The planned body of the hubble repair robot is now the SPDM robot on the international space station. That robot already existed and hadn't yet flown to the space station due to the grounding of the shuttles at the time. Since the robot existed, the schedule, capabilities and cost were all feasible.
The robotics mission was canceled because Griffin didn't like the head of MDA (the robotics company contracted to build the robot portion of hte mission) as they had a rivalry when they both worked at Orbital. The whole 'unfeasible' story is a complete fabrication.
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Hubble was originally intended to operate with 3 functional gyros at all times, but since 2005 has been operating on 2-gyro mode, to extend its useful lifetime in the face of continuing gyro failure. This limits the area of the sky it can view, and makes precise measurements more difficult. Only 3 of its 6 gyros remain functional, and 2 of these are in continual us
Kessler Syndrome (Score:5, Informative)
It's been mentioned before, but this could be the beginning of kessler syndrome [wikipedia.org], and worldwide space agencies might need to deploy junk removal solutions.
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Dunno if you count it as "recent," but (/me shouts:) PLANETES.
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pffffttt.. Wall-E doesn't pay as much attention to accurate micro gravity physics.
Hypocracy (Score:5, Insightful)
They'll send tens of thousands of young men (and women) overseas to be shot at and kill others, but not risk seven lives to fucking further humanity and human knowledge?
I don't get it.
Re:Hypocracy (Score:5, Insightful)
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Easier to hide (Score:2)
Don't forget that policies are in place to not allow the media to show flag draped caskets [armytimes.com]. Seeing a number of dead soldiers is one thing, actually seeing the body count would be a much stronger reaction.
Can't hide a shuttle loss so well.
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"They'll" send tens of thousands overseas? When last I checked, NASA wasn't really given oversight of troop deployment and declarations of war. NASA knows, however, that the public has a low tolerance for highly visible and spectacular deaths, and that every time such a disaster takes place, the entire manned space program and space flight in general is set back by months or years, and given the budget environment and long-standing criticism of their agency may be threatened entirely.
There are dozens of m
No hypocrisy at all (Score:5, Insightful)
1. NASA has a limited number of astronauts.
2. NASA has a limited number of shuttles.
3. The public has very little stomach for "yet another NASA accident"
4. There are far too many in Congress who see the NASA manned program as a waste of money (in other words that money could buy pools and libraries named after Congressmen!)
5. Comparing any item to Iraq expenditures does not bolster your argument, if anything a parrot would suffice.
Why not compare it to the fact we are willing to lose nearly FORTY THOUSAND people to vehicle deaths. The number of soldiers we lose in Iraq while deplorable by any count is minuscule compared to any other war of that scale let alone the deaths at home from stuff that should not happen in the first place.
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They risk astronaut's lives every time they run a mission. In fact I wonder which is more dangerous on a per capita basis -- being a soldier vs. being an astronaut...
It's not that they won't take any risk. It's that some people are discussing whether the risk has been elevated too far above the normal.
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I have a little feeling that the army is spending more on hardware than NASA.
Space shuttle, 1.7B$ each, 5 pcs built = 8.5B$
B2 bomber, 737M$ each, 20 pcs built = 14.7B$
And at costs like that for hardware, training of astronauts / soldiers is fairly neglible.
Soak up debris? (Score:3, Interesting)
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At the peak altitude the rocket explodes, releasing something like strips of foil which will collide with orbiting debris.
And what will this accomplish, apart from making the problem worse by creating even more debris?
Re:Soak up debris? (Score:4, Funny)
The foil strips will make the sky even more pretty and sparkly, just like pixie dust! *taps wand*
Re:Soak up debris? (Score:5, Interesting)
The object you fire from the ground to cause a collision will be shoved sideways a short distance. It can't go into orbit.
Having thought about it for a bit I think the best thing to send up in the sounding rocket is a bottle of liquid nitrogen. It will form an expanding cloud at orbital altitude. Debris which fly through the cloud will lose some speed and their orbits will decay. Sounding rocket firings could be timed to minimise impact on operational spacecraft.
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I proposed something like this, but using something like snowflakes or small particles of dry ice instead of the foil, but it seems collisions at the speeds involved behave quite oddly and even "soft" targets can shatter pieces of debris into multiple smaller pieces mostly in pretty much the same orbit as the originals.
I wonder if some kind of magnetic drag could be devised? a big hoop of superconducting wire with a current in it that would slow down conducting debris that passed through it, but gently, so
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That's what I thought, but apparently what happens is that the fragment shatters, and most of the pieces carry on at almost the same velocity, while just a few are significantly slowed. Essentially your impactor drills a hole through the fragment almost instantly, slowing down only the material actually excavated from the hole. Later, the shock waves propagate sideways through the fragment, shattering it.
Result, more orbiting fragments (albeit smaller ones).
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Result, more orbiting fragments (albeit smaller ones).
If the object you send to collide with the dangerous debris is not in orbit before the collision then it can't be in orbit after the collision. I think a cloud of gas might do the trick, deployed from a sounding rocket, fired straight up from the ground.
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Why not use "fly paper" to catch the small stuff?
Or a big net (same technology as solar sails)?
Then when enough stuff is captured either burn it up by re-entry aimed at a deep trench in the Pacific, or send it into the sun.
Real issue - Nasa does not want to fix Hubble (Score:2, Insightful)
I can read between the lines ....
Nasa does not want to fix the Hubble as there budgets have been cut. They want to put the money for fixing the Hubble into something else.
The Hubble is also Obsolete due to new technologies like Adaptive optics that allow ground based telescopes to achieve the same clarity as the Hubble.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adaptive_optics [wikipedia.org] http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/astronomy/adaptive_optics991006.html [space.com]
Why spend money and risk peoples lives on technology tha
Re:Real issue - Nasa does not want to fix Hubble (Score:5, Informative)
The Hubble is also Obsolete due to new technologies like Adaptive optics that allow ground based telescopes to achieve the same clarity as the Hubble.
You can pull as many adaptive whatchamacallits out of the signal processing toolbox, but that doesn't change the simple fact that certain wavelengths will be absorbed by the atmosphere before they even get to your ground-based telescopes.
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Certainly true, which is part of the reason newer space scopes focus on things like X ray or IR observation, rather than visible wavelengths. But, even at visible wavelengths, a space telescope can do some things a ground scope can't, like take a continuous week long expos
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Just as a data point, it cost something like a billion (1990) dollars to put Hubble into orbit, and over the life of the program, I think they're talking something like 6 billion total (including salaries for the folks who operate it and every other conceivable expense).
Hubble's primary mirror is about 2.4 meters. There's currently a proposed project to build a thirty-meter terrestrial telescope, either in Hawaii or Chile, for about $1 billion.
Launch costs are a b*tch, yes.
A possible shield (Score:3, Interesting)
Since the trajectories of the debris will lie in a relatively narrow plane, it should be possible to device a barrier made of a plastic bag, shaped like a tube (open at both ends perpendicular to the plane of flying debris), and when inflated would make a tube like structure 6 inches thick and just slightly longer than the space shuttle and the Hubble combined. Fill the plastic cylinder full of water. The water freezes harder than steel. You now have an excellent barrier from the debris cloud while you work on Hubble. Now lift Hubble up a few thousand miles to get it out of harms way.
After, you can move water to the ISS for safe keeping. I'm guessing they can put an extra couple thousand gallons to use for anything from experimentation and raising space crops to providing water for the first space hotel. Not to mention if that water has minerals in it, it can be used for everything from dietary supplementation to an emergency shield against high energy solar emissions.
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You can replace the tube with a wall; the debris is coming from a known direction. Doing that produces a wall roughly 125 feet by 60 feet by 6 inches. That's around 100,000 kg. The Shuttle can lift just shy of a quarter of that to low Earth orbit. Also, hypervelocity collisions don't behave like you think they do -- at the least you'd need a spall shield inside the ice shield; you probably need far more than that.
Sorry, the brute force approach to impact shielding just doesn't work when random bits of p
Do you know how that much water weighs? (Score:3, Insightful)
If you want something to cover the length (122.17 ft) and wingspan (78.06 ft) of the shuttle (I'm assuming the tube like device will have a squarish face to it) enough water to fill a 6 inch sheet would be 4768.2951 cubic feet of water! A gallon is .133680555 cubic feet, so that's 35,669.3259 gallons! A gallon of water is 8.33 pounds! That results in 297125.484 lbs. You want to add nearly 150 tons to the shuttle lift off? The shuttle only weighs 120 already! Sure, I'm not including for the fact that w
Surely ? (Score:2)
Surely now that the two satellites have collided and fallen into Siberia, there are two LESS pieces of junk floating around in the atmosphere ?
Wouldn't that make the risk of collision with the Hubble LESS likely ?
Re: (Score:2)
Finally, I get to say it :-)
Whoooooosh
We have to stop... (Score:2)
Megatron and his dastardly Decepticons!
Why ? (Score:5, Informative)
Bruce Willis would go (Score:2)
I am hoping that ... (Score:2)
Totally sux if we lose the hubble mission. I wonder if it is possible to develop a tug to bring it down and up, or one that could remotely do the job (that I really doubt).
Best way to de militarize space (Score:2)
Is to clutter it up with so much debris that no one can launch a thing. In fact it's the best way to end all space flights altogether.
Calculating the odds (Score:2, Interesting)
even before the collision, the risk of an impact was 1 in 185
It's expectable that the risk of impact increases with mission duration. Therefore, how exactly is the risk of an impact measured this way?
"1 in 185" of what?
1 out of 185 two-week (for example) missions will yield one collision (on average)?
1 out of 185 orbits will yield a collision?
What else?
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
As sibling comment says, it was 789km.
A 950kg object struck a 560kg object at 11.7km/s (see hypervelocity [wikipedia.org]). All the pieces have new orbits.
Here's some pretty pretty animation [universetoday.com].