June 1983: Shuttle Window Impact
Details
...during the flight of STS-7 in 1983, a paint fleck only 0.2 mm in size impacted the window and created a pit 0.4 mm deep, which exceeded the allowable damage criteria for reuse of the window outer pane during subsequent launches. This was the first documented example of damage to the Space Shuttle from an orbital debris impact.
September 2006: Shuttle Hit by Circuit Board
Source
Details
The STS-115 flight in 2006 returned with damage to the starboard payload bay radiator number
4 from a hypervelocity debris impact. The debris penetrated both walls of the honeycomb
structure, and the shock wave from the penetration created a crack in the rear surface of the
radiator 6.8 mm long (Figure 4.1-2). Scanning electron microscopy and energy dispersive X-ray
detection analysis of residual material around the hole and in the interior of the radiator shows
that the impactor was a small fragment of circuit board material.
August 2007: Shuttle Radiator Impact
Source
During the August 2007 STS-118 mission to the International Space Station, a micro-meteoroid or orbital debris (MMOD) particle impacted and completely penetrated one of shuttle Endeavour’s radiator panels and the underlying thermal control system (TCS) blanket, leaving deposits on (but no damage to) the payload bay door. While it is not unusual for shuttle orbiters to be impacted by small MMOD particles, the damage from this impact is larger than any previously seen on the shuttle radiator panels.
November 2012: LDEF 20k Impacts
Source
Details
Long Duration Exposure Facility (LDEF) was left in low Earth orbit (LEO) for 5.7 years before being retrieved by space shuttle Columbia in January 1990.
More than 20,000 impacts have been documented on LDEF, approximately 1,000 of which have been chemically analyzed in an attempt to determine the origin of the projectile. These measurements have provided NASA scientists important information not only on the micrometeoroid and orbital debris populations, but their orbital distributions as well.
Details
A piece of space junk threatened to crash into the international space station, forcing the three astronauts to seek emergency shelter.
For nearly an hour on Thursday, the American and two Russians hunkered down in their Soyuz capsule, which is docked to the space station, in case they had to make a quick getaway. The fragment from an old Russian weather satellite ended up passing harmlessly, about 1½ miles (3kms) away.
July 2018: Cygnus Boosts ISS
Source
May 2021: Long March 5B
Source
https://earthsky.org/todays-image/china-uncontrollable-long-march-5b-core-stage-hurls-towards-earth
Details
The core stage of China’s 100-foot (30-m) Long March 5B rocket – which launched the Tianhe space station module on April 29, 2021 – plummeted into the Indian Ocean near the Maldives late Saturday, May 8. It was one of the largest-ever pieces of space debris to make an uncontrolled re-entry back into Earth’s atmosphere. And while, luckily, there were no casualties, sightings and videos were circulating social media platforms as the rocket began its final orbits around Earth. According to China’s Manned Space Engineering Office, the country’s spaceflight agency, the core stage fell around longitude 72.47 degrees east and latitude 2.65 degrees north.
May 2021: Gecko Gripper
Source
https://news.stanford.edu/2021/05/20/gecko-gripper-tested-aboard-iss/
Details
Floating in space in orbit around Earth are millions of pieces of debris. This space junk ranges from specks smaller than a marble to old, defunct satellites. The question is: how do we clean it all up?
A robotic gripper, developed by Stanford engineers, was tested aboard the ISS. Equipped with grippy but not sticky gecko-inspired adhesives, the gripper could be particularly well-suited for tasks such as collecting debris and servicing satellites.
Enter Stanford University’s “gecko gripper,” a mechanical attachment for a robot that can grasp surfaces using adhesive inspired by the pads of a gecko’s feet. The technology could be especially useful in space for the unique fact that the gecko adhesive does not require any force to attach to a surface.
May 2021: ISS robotic arm orbital debris hit
Details
While the utmost precautions are taken to reduce the potential for collisions with the ISS, impacts with tiny objects do occur. One such hit was noticed recently during a routine inspection of Canadarm2 on May 12.
Experts from the Canadian Space Agency (CSA) and NASA worked together to take detailed images of the area and assess the impact, which occurred on one of Canadarm2's boom segments.
Despite the impact, results of the ongoing analysis indicate that the arm's performance remains unaffected. The damage is limited to a small section of the arm boom and thermal blanket.
September 2021: Space junk traffic dangers to be tackled by research centre in UK
Source
November 2021: Three Events
A piece of space junk threatened to crash into the international space station, forcing the three astronauts to seek emergency shelter.
For nearly an hour on Thursday, the American and two Russians hunkered down in their Soyuz capsule, which is docked to the space station, in case they had to make a quick getaway. The fragment from an old Russian weather satellite ended up passing harmlessly, about 1½ miles (3kms) away.
Source
https://www.space.com/41172-cygnus-leaves-space-station-orbital-boost.html
Why I am Interested
Why I am Interested
If a Cygnus has enough Delta V to boost ISS, it may also have enough to grapple with and de-orbit a certain amount of space debris.
Details
While the Cygnus was still docked at the space station's Unity module on Tuesday (July 10), the spacecraft fired its main engine for 50 seconds as part of a test to determine whether the cargo ship can be used to raise the space station's orbit, Frank DeMauro, Vice President of Advanced Programs at NGIS, told Space.com.
About the size of a short bus, the Cygnus may look puny compared to the ISS, which is as big as a football field. But its powerful Delta-V engine provided enough thrust to raise the space station by about 282 feet (86 meters). "The burn went extremely well," DeMauro said. "The spacecraft behaved exactly as we expected."
"We have several thrusters on the spacecraft that we use for controlling the spacecraft, but we have one big engine that we use … to actually raise our orbit from where the Antares rocket left us off up to the station's orbit," DeMauro said. "So, we looked at that and said, that engine has enough thrust and is very efficient, and we could use that engine while we were attached to the space station as a way to provide a boost to the station orbit."
April 2020: Hubble Solar Arrays
Source
https://www.esa.int/Safety_Security/Hubble_s_impactful_life_alongside_space_debris
Details
Metals like iron and nickel would suggest an impact from a natural source – fragments of asteroids and comets known as micrometeoroids. The craters found in Hubble’s solar arrays however contained small amounts of aluminum and oxygen, a strong indication of human activity in the form of ‘solid rocket motor’ firing residues.
September 2020: ISS Avoids Debris
Source
Created by Japanese start-up Astroscale, ELSA-d consists of two satellites stacked together. The first part is a service craft designed to safely remove debris from orbit. This is docked with a smaller satellite that replicates a piece of space debris during test flights.
Details
While the Cygnus was still docked at the space station's Unity module on Tuesday (July 10), the spacecraft fired its main engine for 50 seconds as part of a test to determine whether the cargo ship can be used to raise the space station's orbit, Frank DeMauro, Vice President of Advanced Programs at NGIS, told Space.com.
About the size of a short bus, the Cygnus may look puny compared to the ISS, which is as big as a football field. But its powerful Delta-V engine provided enough thrust to raise the space station by about 282 feet (86 meters). "The burn went extremely well," DeMauro said. "The spacecraft behaved exactly as we expected."
"We have several thrusters on the spacecraft that we use for controlling the spacecraft, but we have one big engine that we use … to actually raise our orbit from where the Antares rocket left us off up to the station's orbit," DeMauro said. "So, we looked at that and said, that engine has enough thrust and is very efficient, and we could use that engine while we were attached to the space station as a way to provide a boost to the station orbit."
April 2020: Hubble Solar Arrays
Source
https://www.esa.int/Safety_Security/Hubble_s_impactful_life_alongside_space_debris
Details
Metals like iron and nickel would suggest an impact from a natural source – fragments of asteroids and comets known as micrometeoroids. The craters found in Hubble’s solar arrays however contained small amounts of aluminum and oxygen, a strong indication of human activity in the form of ‘solid rocket motor’ firing residues.
Source
https://blogs.nasa.gov/spacestation/2020/09/22/station-boosts-orbit-to-avoid-space-debris/
March 2021: ELSA-d Demonstrator
Source
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/05/space-junk-clean-satellite/
Details
On March 22, 2021, a craft resembling a washing machine with wings was catapulted into the sky from Kazakhstan on a Soyuz rocket, in what its inventors describe as, “the start of the world’s first commercial mission to prove the core technologies necessary for space debris docking and removal.”
The launch of the ELSA-d mission — the demonstration of a pioneering method to capture and safely remove space debris from orbit using magnetic retrieval — is part of efforts by a number of companies to conduct a celestial litter-picking exercise on a grand scale.
Details
Using the ISS Progress 75 thrusters and with NASA and Russian flight controllers working in tandem, the International Space Station conducted a 150-second reboost Tuesday afternoon at 5:19 p.m. EDT to avoid a possible conjunction with an unknown piece of space debris. Because of the late notification of the possible conjunction, the three Expedition 63 crew members were directed to move to the Russian segment of the station to be closer to their Soyuz MS-16 spacecraft as part of the safe haven procedure out of an abundance of caution. At no time was the crew in any danger.
November 2020: SpaceX's Starship may help clean up space junk
Source
Details
SpaceX president and chief operating officer Gwynne Shotwell highlighted that potential cleanup role recently. During an online "Time 100 Talks" interview with Time Magazine that was posted on Oct. 22, she said that "it's quite possible that we could leverage Starship to go to some of some of these dead rocket bodies — other people's rockets, of course — basically, go pick up some of this junk in outer space."
Source
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/05/space-junk-clean-satellite/
Details
On March 22, 2021, a craft resembling a washing machine with wings was catapulted into the sky from Kazakhstan on a Soyuz rocket, in what its inventors describe as, “the start of the world’s first commercial mission to prove the core technologies necessary for space debris docking and removal.”
The launch of the ELSA-d mission — the demonstration of a pioneering method to capture and safely remove space debris from orbit using magnetic retrieval — is part of efforts by a number of companies to conduct a celestial litter-picking exercise on a grand scale.
Created by Japanese start-up Astroscale, ELSA-d consists of two satellites stacked together. The first part is a service craft designed to safely remove debris from orbit. This is docked with a smaller satellite that replicates a piece of space debris during test flights.
April 2021: SpaceX Crew Dragon "Conjunction"
Source
Source
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Am0CbRDxXp4
Details
About 8 hours after launch on April 23, SpaceX Crew Dragon "Endeavor" was informed by mission control of an incoming piece of orbital debris that would pass close to their spacecraft. The crew was told to cover the windows with kevlar blankets, put on their pressurized flight suits, and get in their seats just in case there was an impact that caused a loss of air pressure. The crew were then told that the object would pass farther away than expected, but they remained in their seats as a precaution. The time of closest approach passed, and the crew resumed normal operations. HOWEVER, on April 26 the U.S. Space Command confirmed that the whole incident was a "false alarm". Space Command's 18th Space Control Squadron alerted NASA to the potential conjunction just 45 minutes before closest approach, and within 15 minutes the astronauts were notified on live TV. "However," according to spokesperson Lt. Col. Erin Dick, "we quickly realized this was a reporting error, and that there was never a collision threat because there was no object at risk of colliding with the capsule." Additional information may be released later this week.
Details
About 8 hours after launch on April 23, SpaceX Crew Dragon "Endeavor" was informed by mission control of an incoming piece of orbital debris that would pass close to their spacecraft. The crew was told to cover the windows with kevlar blankets, put on their pressurized flight suits, and get in their seats just in case there was an impact that caused a loss of air pressure. The crew were then told that the object would pass farther away than expected, but they remained in their seats as a precaution. The time of closest approach passed, and the crew resumed normal operations. HOWEVER, on April 26 the U.S. Space Command confirmed that the whole incident was a "false alarm". Space Command's 18th Space Control Squadron alerted NASA to the potential conjunction just 45 minutes before closest approach, and within 15 minutes the astronauts were notified on live TV. "However," according to spokesperson Lt. Col. Erin Dick, "we quickly realized this was a reporting error, and that there was never a collision threat because there was no object at risk of colliding with the capsule." Additional information may be released later this week.
17:24:24 GMT - Crew informed of approaching object
17:43-ish GMT - Closest approach to supposed object
May 2021: Long March 5B
Source
https://earthsky.org/todays-image/china-uncontrollable-long-march-5b-core-stage-hurls-towards-earth
Details
The core stage of China’s 100-foot (30-m) Long March 5B rocket – which launched the Tianhe space station module on April 29, 2021 – plummeted into the Indian Ocean near the Maldives late Saturday, May 8. It was one of the largest-ever pieces of space debris to make an uncontrolled re-entry back into Earth’s atmosphere. And while, luckily, there were no casualties, sightings and videos were circulating social media platforms as the rocket began its final orbits around Earth. According to China’s Manned Space Engineering Office, the country’s spaceflight agency, the core stage fell around longitude 72.47 degrees east and latitude 2.65 degrees north.
May 2021: Gecko Gripper
Source
https://news.stanford.edu/2021/05/20/gecko-gripper-tested-aboard-iss/
Details
Floating in space in orbit around Earth are millions of pieces of debris. This space junk ranges from specks smaller than a marble to old, defunct satellites. The question is: how do we clean it all up?
A robotic gripper, developed by Stanford engineers, was tested aboard the ISS. Equipped with grippy but not sticky gecko-inspired adhesives, the gripper could be particularly well-suited for tasks such as collecting debris and servicing satellites.
Enter Stanford University’s “gecko gripper,” a mechanical attachment for a robot that can grasp surfaces using adhesive inspired by the pads of a gecko’s feet. The technology could be especially useful in space for the unique fact that the gecko adhesive does not require any force to attach to a surface.
Source
While the utmost precautions are taken to reduce the potential for collisions with the ISS, impacts with tiny objects do occur. One such hit was noticed recently during a routine inspection of Canadarm2 on May 12.
Experts from the Canadian Space Agency (CSA) and NASA worked together to take detailed images of the area and assess the impact, which occurred on one of Canadarm2's boom segments.
Despite the impact, results of the ongoing analysis indicate that the arm's performance remains unaffected. The damage is limited to a small section of the arm boom and thermal blanket.
July 2021: Elon Musk says SpaceX's Starship could 'chomp up' space junk
Source
Details
SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said the company's Starship craft could use it moving door to "chomp up" debris in space.
"We can fly Starship around space & chomp up debris with the moving fairing door," he said on Twitter on Saturday.
The fairing door can open when it reaches a certain orbit, deploy spacecraft, and close before Starship makes it way back to Earth, according to SpaceX's users' guide for the rocket system.
Musk was responding to a Twitter user who asked the billionaire entrepreneur whether SpaceX had any ideas for clearing up space junk.
July 2021: Senators push for action on space traffic management
Source
Details
At the July 22 hearing of the Senate Commerce Committee’s space subcommittee, senators said they were worried that slow action by the Commerce Department to set up a civil STM system as outlined in Space Policy Directive (SPD) 3 in 2018 threatened U.S. leadership in space.
September 2021: Space junk traffic dangers to be tackled by research centre in UK
Source
https://warwick.ac.uk/newsandevents/pressreleases/space_junk_traffic/
New ways of tackling the threat that space junk in our skies poses are being explored by University of Warwick scientists, as they pioneer new research that could help the UK fulfil its ambition to become a responsible spacefaring nation.
New ways of tackling the threat that space junk in our skies poses are being explored by University of Warwick scientists, as they pioneer new research that could help the UK fulfil its ambition to become a responsible spacefaring nation.
November 2021: Three Events
November 10 Event Source
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/10/science/china-debris-space-station.html
Details
On Wednesday, about six hours before NASA’s Crew-3 mission launched to orbit, the International Space Station was forced to maneuver itself to avoid a piece of debris spawned by a Chinese antisatellite weapon test in 2007.
The piece of junk was projected to enter what’s called the “pizza box,” a square-shaped zone 2.5 miles deep and 30 miles wide, where the station sits in the middle. NASA officials keep close eyes on the zone using data models on the location of objects in space kept by the U.S. Space Command.
Faced with a threat to the zone, the agency worked with Russia’s space agency in Moscow to fire station thrusters that raised its altitude by just under a mile.
November 15 Event Source
https://money.yahoo.com/iss-astronauts-emergency-precautions-debris-140528104.html
Details
https://money.yahoo.com/iss-astronauts-emergency-precautions-debris-140528104.html
Details
Astronauts on board the International Space Station have been forced to take emergency precautions amid an alert over dangerous space debris.
Crew in both the Russian and American parts of the station went into the Soyuz and SpaceX Crew Dragon capsules in case the debris collided with the ISS. They were instructed to shelter in space in fear of a collision.
They have since returned to the main station and did not find any signs of a collision, according to live Nasa broadcasts of the conversations between the crew and ground control.
The debris cloud appears to be passing by the ISS on a regular, 90-minute schedule, as both of them orbit around the Earth, Nasa said. As such, operations had not returned entirely to normal – some parts of the ISS were still closed off – but engineers on the ground appeared confident that the threat had mostly passed.
Crew in both the Russian and American parts of the station went into the Soyuz and SpaceX Crew Dragon capsules in case the debris collided with the ISS. They were instructed to shelter in space in fear of a collision.
They have since returned to the main station and did not find any signs of a collision, according to live Nasa broadcasts of the conversations between the crew and ground control.
The debris cloud appears to be passing by the ISS on a regular, 90-minute schedule, as both of them orbit around the Earth, Nasa said. As such, operations had not returned entirely to normal – some parts of the ISS were still closed off – but engineers on the ground appeared confident that the threat had mostly passed.
November 29 Event Source
https://blogs.nasa.gov/spacestation/2021/11/30/nasa-teams-delay-spacewalk-after-debris-notification/
Details
The evening of Monday, Nov. 29, NASA received a debris notification for the International Space Station. Due to the lack of opportunity to properly assess the risk it could pose to the astronauts, teams have decided to delay the spacewalk planned for Tuesday, Nov. 30 until more information is available.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.