Tag: space junk

An unmanned spacecraft designed to get rid of space junk is set to launch in 2018, and use a new European built reusable launch system.

8:52 am

The competition heats up: An unmanned spacecraft designed to get rid of space junk is set to launch in 2018, and use a new European built reusable launch system.

Both components of this story are significant. First, a company has gotten the necessary financing to build the spacecraft, proving that there is profit to be made in the removal of space junk. Second, the launch system is simple and reusable, and will lower the cost of getting small payloads into orbit significantly. And it appears it is being built.

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NASA revealed Tuesday that last April the Fermi Gamma-Ray Telescope barely avoided a collision with an abandoned Russian satellite.

9:37 pm

NASA revealed Tuesday that last April the Fermi Gamma-Ray Telescope barely avoided a collision with an abandoned Russian satellite.

Fermi mission scientists first learned of the space collision threat on March 29, 2012 when they received a notice that the space telescope and Cosmos 1805 would miss each other by just 700 feet (213.4 meters). The mission team monitored the situation over the next day and it became clear that the two spacecraft, traveling in different orbits, would zip through the same point in space within 30 milliseconds of one another, NASA officials said.

They used Fermi’s thrusters to shift its orbit enough so the two spacecraft missed each other by 6 miles.

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Last night a piece of space junk missed ISS, but not by much.

8:14 am

Last night a piece of space junk missed ISS, but not by much.

The debris was only 8.7 miles from the station when it zipped by at about 16,000 miles per hour. That is very close, and had it hit, it would have done very significant damage.

The fragment was from an old Russian satellite, Cosmos 2251, that collided with an Iridium satellite in 2009, producing hundreds of fragments more than two inches across.

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Why things break in space

3:22 pm

Updated and bumped: I will be discussing this story on the the John Batchelor Show tonight, February 17, Friday, 12:50 am (Eastern), and then re-aired on Sunday, February 19, 12:50 am (Eastern).
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Someday, humans will be traveling far from Earth in large interplanetary spaceships not very different than the International Space Station (ISS). Isolated and dependent on these ships for survival, these travelers will have no choice but to know how to maintain and repair their vessels whenever something on them should break.

And things will break. Entropy rules, and with time all things deteriorate and fail.

Each failure, however, is also a precious opportunity to learn something about the environment of space. Why did an item break? What caused it to fail? Can we do something to prevent the failure in the future? Finding answers to these questions will make it possible to build better and more reliable interplanetary spaceships.

ISS is presently our only testbed for studying these kinds of engineering questions. And in 2007, a spectacular failure, combined with an epic spacewalk, gave engineers at the Johnson Space Center a marvelous opportunity to study these very issues.
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Phobos-Grunt due to crash to Earth anytime in the next ten hours

9:00 am

path of Phobos-Grunt's reentry

Updated and bumped. An updated prediction from Aerospace now calls for Phobos-Grunt to come down sometime between 9 and 3 pm (Eastern). This puts the U.S. now out of danger, though Europe, South America, Africa, Australia, and the southern half of Asia all remain in the spacecraft’s path.

Watch your heads! Phobos-Grunt is due to crash to Earth anytime in the next ten hours. And unfortunately, this new prediction has it flying over both North America and much of Europe and Africa during that time period.

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Toxic Russian Mars probe aims for Earth

5:50 pm

It now looks like the stranded and toxic Russian Mars probe, Phobos-Grunt, is likely aimed at Earth.

We are looking at an uncontrolled toxic reentry scenario. Phobos-Grunt . . . is fully-laden with unsymmetrical dimethylhydrazine and nitrogen tetroxide; that’s ten tons of fuel and oxidizer. The probe itself weighs-in at only three tons. . . . Phobos-Grunt’s batteries are draining and its orbit is degrading. It looks as if the probe will reenter later this month/early December. NORAD is putting a Nov. 26 reentry date on Phobos-Grunt.

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It looks bad for Phobos-Grunt

8:57 am

It looks bad for Phobos-Grunt.

“Overnight, several attempts were made to obtain telemetric information from the probe. They all ended with zero result,” Interfax quoted a source in the Russian space sector as saying. “The probability of saving the probe is very, very small,” added the source, who was not identified.

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A second large satellite will rain debris down in October

10:06 am

Even if UARS misses you today, don’t relax! A second large satellite, the 2.4 ton ROSAT X-Ray space telescope, is going to rain debris down late in October or early November.

On its ROSAT website, DLR estimates that “up to 30 individual debris items with a total mass of up to 1.6 tonnes might reach the surface of the Earth. The X-ray optical system, with its mirrors and a mechanical support structure made of carbon-fibre reinforced composite – or at least a part of it – could be the heaviest single component to reach the ground.”

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