Space Station Dodges Piece Of Old NASA Satellite

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — The International Space Station has steered clear of space junk.

Flight controllers fired thrusters on the space station Tuesday morning. That moved the orbiting lab and its crew of six safely away from a chunk of an old NASA research satellite.

The debris originally was projected to come within one-tenth of a mile of the space station. The latest estimate put the close approach at a half-mile. Because of the uncertainty, NASA elected to move the space station.

NASA says the space station relocation will have no significant impact on next Monday's launch of the space shuttle Discovery. Discovery launched the atmospheric research satellite in 1991.

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Online:

NASA: http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/main/index.html

Comments

[trojoe]

05:23 PM on 10/29/2010

We should be sending this stuff on it's way to the sun, natures incinerator.

[rikster]

09:11 PM on 10/28/2010

sounds like we need a very large space garbage can...

[theatheo]

09:04 PM on 10/28/2010

People suck.

[Sita001]

01:31 PM on 10/27/2010

Can't some company like VirginGalactic send out a roving space junk scow and start retrieving all the debris? Don't bring it back to earth, get it sent to a 'landfill' on the moon until we can start recycling it into the first moon base.

[jsarets]

10:04 PM on 10/27/2010

No, Virgin Galactic is suborbital. They can only reach an altitude 68 miles (compared to 130 miles for low earth orbit) and only for a moment before they come back down.

Collecting orbital debris is a difficult problem. Impact momentum significantly affects orbiting vehicles, so they can't just plow through a debris field. They'd have to reach out and gently grapple the debris before stowing them.

Jon Goff (previously with Masten Space Systems) has started a new business called Altius that is developing a pole-based capture and docking system using a suction grapple that can be used to collect orbital debris (which don't have purpose-built grapple fixtures).

[ninja45]

09:00 AM on 10/28/2010

Maybe they could use this:

http://www.engadget.com/2010/10/27/university-of-chicago-cornell-researchers-develop-universal-rob/

I always thought that the momentum was relative though. If the craft had the same speed and trajectory as the debris would it be able to just open up some bay doors and "scoop" it up?

[PengieP]

01:15 PM on 10/28/2010

Please explain to me how a suction grapple works in the vacuum of high Earth orbit?

[NCEngineer]

08:24 PM on 10/26/2010

It is a shame that we are polluting the space around our planet as we have done with the planet itself. Someone really needs to take a look at how we can avoid this problem in the future, I can only imagine what this will look like in in 100 years.

[jsarets]

10:12 PM on 10/27/2010

Many modern LEO satellites and launch vehicle upper stages are designed to deorbit themselves and burn up in the atmosphere at the end of their missions. Most GEO satellites (which inhabit a precious ribbon of orbital real estate) are designed to propel themselves into a permanent "graveyard" orbit at the end of their missions.

As is often the case with many kinds of pollution, most of the orbital debris are from vehicles launched in the 50s through 70s, before the aerospace industry became concerned about such things and began to clean up their act. But that generation left many problems that will stick around for a while yet.

[lightningbolt]

03:50 PM on 10/26/2010

At some point in the near future, NASA should create a junk-collection mission and remove all the old dead satellites and junk from orbit.

[Binro the Heretic]

04:39 PM on 10/26/2010

QUARK! :-)

[uansari1]

10:24 AM on 10/28/2010

Can you imagine the public outcry from the right? It would be an expensive mission, to be sure... but we helped create the problem in the first place.

[Hypocrites are Watching]

01:45 PM on 10/26/2010

yiles thats bad we surrounded our planet with junk