International Space Station Astronauts Take Shelter From Space Junk

(MARCIA DUNN, AP/THE HUFFINGTON POST)CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. -- The six space station astronauts took shelter in lifeboats Tuesday when a piece of orbiting junk came dangerously close.

The unidentified object came within 1,100 feet of the space station – closer than any piece of space junk ever, said NASA's space operations chief, Bill Gerstenmaier.

Mission Control ordered the astronauts into the two Russian Soyuz capsules parked at the space station Tuesday morning. NASA got just 14 hours' notice of the close approach, not nearly enough time to move the space station out of harm's way.

The call to seek shelter came around 7:30 a.m. EDT. The time of closest approach was a little after 8 a.m. Mission Control gave the all-clear a few minutes later. The two Americans, three Russians and one Japanese floated back into the space station and resumed normal work.

Even a small piece of debris can do big damage. The astronauts could have undocked in their two Soyuz capsules and returned to Earth, in case of a serious collision.

Gerstenmaier said NASA managers are working with their Russian counterparts to reduce the amount of time needed to move the space station away from space junk. Right now, a couple of days are needed. Changes in computer software should improve that.

NASA does not know how big the object was or where it came from. It could well be a chunk of an old satellite or spent rocket.

Space shuttle Atlantis, meanwhile, is on track to blast off to the space station on July 8. It will be the last shuttle flight in NASA history. Atlantis will be filled with a year's worth of food and other station supplies.

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Comments

[iRob08]

05:52 PM on 06/29/2011

Some days you take out the trash, but if you live on the ISS, the trash can take you out

[jsarets]

03:45 PM on 06/29/2011

It's a good thing that every ISS crew member has a seat on a Soyuz spacecraft that remains docked to the station throughout their rotation. If they need to return early for any reason, their Soyuz is always on standby ready to go.

They don't need to wait for NASA to send a Shuttle, which would take at least 6 days to reach the ISS from the word GO even if there were a Shuttle stack waiting on the launch pad just for this contingency and there were no technical issues or weather delays. If the ISS happens to be orbiting at a solar beta angle greater than 60 degrees at the time of the emergency, it could be a month before the Shuttle can launch because of thermal constraints.

Shuttle uses liquid hydrogen fuel cells to generate electrical power. It can't stay on orbit for longer than 17 days, tops, before its power runs out. It can't double as a lifeboat like Soyuz does.

Even if it could stay at the station, the station crew would be too weak from prolonged microgravity to sit upright on the flight deck and land the Shuttle. When Shuttle has returned ISS crew members, they use special reclined seats which only fit on the mid-deck. Soyuz doesn't have this problem, because the seats in the capsule are such that the g-load is against the back rather than up the spine, and Soyuz is completely automatic between entry interface and touchdown.

And NASA never had enough money to develop a suitable lifeboat to completion while they were operating the Shuttle. Their most successful attempt, the X-38, was cancelled after the loss of Space Shuttle Columbia because NASA needed the funds to save the Shuttle program. So Soyuz has always been indispensable to the ISS. The station could not be safely manned without it.

[tumbler snapper]

01:32 PM on 06/30/2011

Soyuz. The only game in town.

[imonlyhereforthelaughs]

01:39 PM on 06/29/2011

Looks like the North Korean space program strikes again...

[Tom95134]

01:27 PM on 06/29/2011

When you're in orbit you can't keep dumping the trash to leeward.

[HighDesertBob]

01:02 PM on 06/29/2011

They should load up the space station with a couple of lasers to take care of stuff like this. They have been spending millions of dollars on the Airborne Laser, they should have developed one they could mount on the space station to deflect or destroy space junk if it gets too close. It's junk, after all.

[jsarets]

02:16 PM on 06/29/2011

They'd have to be very careful not to break the MMOD into pieces, because that won't stop the incoming trajectory in space, and small pieces moving at high relative velocity can still cause critical damage. It could work, or maybe not.

[HighDesertBob]

02:34 PM on 06/29/2011

I can't help but think someone in NASA has thought of this, at least I hope they have. They would have to try and intercept the debris far enough away so as to try and deflect the thing away from the space station. It's worth a try.

[tumbler snapper]

01:30 PM on 06/30/2011

The directed weapon portion of the airborne laser uses tremendous amounts of power. Not feasible.

[AlsoSarah]

12:42 PM on 06/29/2011

What was the space junk? Don't tell me they don't know.

[jsarets]

02:35 PM on 06/29/2011

They don't know. Seriously. The 21st Space Wing of the U.S. Air Force Space Command uses radar systems on the ground and in geosynchronous orbit to track hundreds of thousands of objects larger than 1cm in earth orbit, but only tens of thousands are associated with a known object or debris event.

For example, they're tracking at least 2,300 pieces of debris in sun-synchronous orbital altitudes associated with the Chinese anti-satellite missile test in 2007. This was by far the largest debris event in history. NASA has already had to maneuver their flagship earth science satellite, Terra, out of the way of that debris cloud, and satellite operators will continue to tip-toe around this obstacle for decades before the orbit begins to decay.

They know exactly where that debris cloud came from, but more often, they just know that there's something on radar of an approximate size on an approximate trajectory and there's a certain probability that the object will hit an active satellite or the International Space Station. They usually don't know what it is or where it came from, because we simply haven't been tracking these debris for a long enough time at a high enough resolution to build up a comprehensive history.

The infuriating Chinese ASAT incident aside, most of the debris are left over from the Cold War era. We're a lot better today at minimizing space junk, but in the past we were really laissez faire about it. We didn't anticipate it becoming a problem, or we simply could be bothered to care at the time.

[Westof405]

08:05 PM on 06/29/2011

Good post. I presume you've seen the maps of space junk posted on the web. Hard to believe how much is whizzing around up there. I'm surprised satellites don't get hit more often.

[coffeeparty]

12:36 PM on 06/29/2011

Where is Fred Sanford when you need him?

[porsche996]

11:57 AM on 06/29/2011

Clearly there is a business plan available for some entrepreneur....space junk disposal device....dusting and cleaning of the lower orbits is needed.

[ikswoliw]

11:56 AM on 06/29/2011

Bad link to article

[MikeDu]

11:56 AM on 06/29/2011

What exactly does the space station 'do'? Considering that it cost us a veritable fortune to construct, what is its purpose? And please none of that 1960s "last frontier" touchy-feely nonsense.

[coffeeparty]

12:34 PM on 06/29/2011

Valuable science.
What does MikeDu?

[MikeDu]

01:14 PM on 06/29/2011

What does MikeDu? On a dollar-per-dollar basis, a hell of a lot more than the international space stations. A shuttle launch to fix the space station's toilet cost the rough equivalent of 350 lifetimes w2 wages for me. Where are the peer-reviewed papers? Where are the breakthroughs? It seems community colleges have more productive science departments than the space station.

[tumbler snapper]

01:44 PM on 06/30/2011

"...Valuable science..." Tell me all about it.

[jsarets]

02:59 PM on 06/29/2011

This is a 262 page document entitled "International Space Station Science Research Accomplishments During the Assembly Years: An Analysis of Results from 2000-2008":

http://hdl.handle.net/2060/20090029998

That's just the majority of the assembly phase, ending with the expansion of the full-time station crew from three to six in 2008. The pace of science utilization has increased with the new crew size and is further increasing now that the assembly phase is complete.

For example, the crew used to spend a lot of time moving stuff around from one temporary stowage location to another because there was no dedicated stowage area and they were constantly having to clear space for assembly work. Several of the rack spaces in the Destiny lab module were used for stowage instead of science, and the Columbus lab module was usually filled with stowage. Now the complete station has a permanent stowage module, and all of the stowage has been removed from the lab modules to make room for their full complement of science racks.

[abuckley23]

11:53 AM on 06/29/2011

Why didn't they just use their phasers and zap the space junk!? Oh right...reality...I remember now.

[Red Russet]

11:39 AM on 06/29/2011

Well it's bound to happen, isn't it? How many years have they been leaving all that trash up there and never cleaned any of it up? Typical men running space programs, can't pick up after themselves. If women ran those programs space would be clean as a whistle.

[netzwerg]

11:25 AM on 06/29/2011

Long live Soyuz!

[damnfine213]

10:18 AM on 06/29/2011

Said "space junk" turned out to be Transformers: Dark of the Moon