Space Junk Threatening Space Station, NASA Says!

Space Junk Threatening Space Station, NASA Says!

www.foxnews.com

A small piece of space junk is drifting dangerously close to the International Space Station.
NASA has ordered the three station astronauts to seek shelter late Tuesday afternoon in the Russian Soyuz capsule that is docked at the orbiting complex. A NASA spokesman says there's no time to steer the station out of harm's way.

(visit the link for the full news article)


Related News Links:
www.nasa.gov
www.wftv.com

You can listen live on the nasa link what is going down, they are in the escape craft and waiting for instructions.
Does anyone know were the station is at this moment? I know it is moving.


The strange thing is that they are calling it an object trough the live stream. In the article is states it is from a chinese satellite the blew up last year.
The Story said it's traveling 5 miles per second...
so 300 miles per minute
so 18000 miles per hour. Correct me if I am wrong.

Ladies and gentlemen, lets hope nothing happens. I have nothing else to write on this cause I have no idea what to write.

More to come when the story develops.







I hope you forgive me.




Peace

www.foxnews.com
(visit the link for the full news article)

Tracking

Here you go.

reply to post by sevensheeps


ISS is off the west coast of south-america, live feed shows that crew do not appear to be in escape craft at this time. Puzzling is the fact that ISS appears to be gaining altitude at roughly a mile a minute, although this could be normal as i don't know the ins-and-outs of space station operation!

reply to post by Fiberx



Thank you, have you watched the live channel now? What are they doing, putting cd's in rackets and talking about a moving glacier?

It is getting a little strange..

Nice find, and interesting stuff there. I will be curious to see what happens. This could actually put an end to the space program if the station were damaged badly enough. Its already a shame that NASA has stopped shuttle missions. It would almost seem a blessing in disguise for NASA as this would be a good way to put an end to space missions completely for now.

reply to post by movetovanuatu


I know, it's like they are preparing? But for what? Some time ago they where in the escape craft but it seems they have to put some cd's away and stuff? It's really weird for a dangerous situation.

reply to post by sevensheeps


Jeez! Thinking about it, that's a pretty high speed to be going away from earth, no voice activity for ages now, the suspicius part of my brain is thinking "fake feed, real problems so shut down", but the other part is like "calm down nothings going on"..... however did anybody just hear that? "You are go for THAT PROCEDURE" I wonder what this mystery procedure involves?

they seem pretty nervous.

Does anybody why they're speaking in different languages and also what are they unscrewing?

I'm sure last year the had a similar problem with passing junk. They had to confine thmsselves in that incident too.

Video seems to have been halted. Interesting. Limited amount of speech coming out too.

I can't hear the live stream...

do i need to unblock something?

They've stopped the live feed it appears
Hope this doesn't mean a potential hit of the station

Barry is about to new conference on something, could this be about the ISS or is it a scheduled conference at Budget

reply to post by fltcui


No....that happens all the time...it just means they lost the signal. That happens many times a day. They don't expect it to get close until 4:21 eastern time. The crew doesn't seem nervous, they were laughing and unhooking the hoses and just getting ready. They are true professionals. I think they will be ok....the pod they will use is just for that reason. It's like the ISS's lifeboat.....and they can return to earth in it. I hope nothing happens because as we speak, there is a 3 person crew enroute TO the space station...so I hope they have one to arrive to!

EDIT....just heard on the live feed....the alert is cancelled and back to normal....it will miss the ISS

Danger is over now....alert cancelled

I was waiting for NASA to deploy its array of lasers at this "space junk"/ Chinese satellites.

We investigate the feasibility of using a medium-powered (5kW) ground-based laser combined with a ground-based telescope to prevent collisions between debris objects in low-Earth orbit (LEO), for which there is no current, effective mitigation strategy. The scheme utilizes photon pressure alone as a means to perturb the orbit of a debris object. Applied over multiple engagements, this alters the debris orbit sufficiently to reduce the risk of an upcoming conjunction. We employ standard assumptions for atmospheric conditions and the resulting beam propagation. Using case studies designed to represent the properties (e.g. area and mass) of the current debris population, we show that one could significantly reduce the risk of more than half of all debris-debris collisions using only one such laser/telescope facility. We speculate on whether this could mitigate the debris fragmentation rate such that it falls below the natural debris re-entry rate due to atmospheric drag, and thus whether continuous long-term operation could entirely mitigate the Kessler syndrome in LEO, without need for relatively expensive active debris removal.

arxiv.org...

Who knows??

The laser to be used in the new system is the kind used for welding and cutting in car factories and other industrial processes. They’re commercially available for about $0.8 million. The rest of the system could cost between a few and a few tens of millions of dollars, depending on whether the researchers build it from scratch or modify an existing telescope, perhaps a telescope at the Air Force Maui Optical Station in Hawaii or at Mt. Stromlo in Australia.

“This system solves technological problems, makes them cheaper, and makes it less of a threat that these will be used for nefarious things,” said space security expert Brian Weeden, a technical adviser for the Secure World Foundation who was not involved in the new study. “It’s certainly very interesting.”

However, “I don’t think this is a long-term solution,” Weeden said. “It might be useful to buy some time. But I don’t think it would replace the need to remove debris, or stop creating new junk.”

Don Kessler, from whom the Kessler syndrome takes its name, agrees, and points out that laser light isn’t forceful enough to divert the biggest pieces of junk.

“The only complete solution to is to prevent collisions involving the most massive objects in Earth orbit,” he said.

www.wired.com...

CNN BREAKING NEWS -- [Updated at 3:34 p.m. ET] NASA determined Tuesday that a piece of space junk will not pose a threat to the crew aboard the International Space Station.


news.blogs.cnn.com...

reply to post by sevensheeps


Greetings:

You beat me to it by a few minutes. Good catch.

Please allow us to add to the discussion.

This is what appears to be "the target."


NASA - International Space Station

ISS

Now, exactly what is being discussed here?

The debris -- estimated to be about 6 inches square (39 sq. centimeter) -- is from a Chinese satellite that was deliberately destroyed in 2007 as part of a weapons test. It was projected to pass within three miles (five kilometers) of the space station, warranting a red threat level -- NASA's highest. source

The "Space Station Destroyer." (Well, actually, a relatively small piece - 6" square).


China destroyed one of its own – an aging Fengyun-1C weather satellite – via an anti-satellite test.
CREDIT: Federation of American Scientists.

China suffered widespread condemnation after their 2007 anti-satellite missile test, both for the military implications as well as the huge amount of debris it created.[64] This is the largest single space debris incident in history, estimated to have created more than 2,300 pieces (updated 13 December 2007) of trackable debris (approximately golf ball size or larger), over 35,000 pieces 1 cm (0.4 in) or larger, and 1 million pieces 1 mm (0.04 in) or larger.

The intentional destruction on Jan. 11 of China's Fengyun-1C weather satellite via an anti-satellite (ASAT) device launched by the Chinese has created a mess of fragments fluttering through space.

The satellite's destruction is now being viewed as the most prolific and severe fragmentation in the course of five decades of space operations.

Particularly worrying is the fact that the test took place in the most densely populated part of space, as the target satellite orbited between 850 kilometres (530 mi) and 882 kilometres (548 mi). Since the atmospheric drag is quite low at that altitude, the debris will persist for decades. In June 2007, NASA's Terra environmental spacecraft was the first to perform a maneuver in order to prevent impacts from this debris.

And this from space.com:

As of today, the U.S. military's Space Surveillance Network has cataloged nearly 600 debris fragments, according to NASA's Nicholas Johnson, Chief Scientist for Orbital Debris at the space agency's Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas.

However, more than 300 additional fragments are also being tracked, bringing it to a total of more than 900 bits of clutter. "These will be cataloged in due course," Johnson added.

"The total count of tracked objects could go even higher. Based upon the mass of Fengyun-1C and the conditions of the breakup, the standard NASA model for estimating the number of objects greater than 4 inches (10 centimeters) in size predicts a total about 950 such debris," Johnson advised SPACE.com.

Johnson said that the debris cloud extends from less than 125 miles (200 kilometers) to more than 2,292 miles (3,850 kilometers), encompassing all of low Earth orbit. The majority of the debris have mean altitudes of 528 miles (850 kilometers) or greater, "which means most will be very long-lived," he said.

The number of smaller orbital debris from this breakup is much higher than the 900-plus being tracked. NASA estimates that the number of debris larger than 1 centimeter is greater than 35,000 bits of riff-raff. source

[color=Limegreen]GAG!

"Let's hope the ISS doesn't blow up today!" Chad Meyers-CNN 2:22 PM EST.

"500,000 pieces the size of a marble that are being tracked..."

"Didn't see it until too late to move ISS." 3:12 PM EST.

Let's see. In 2004:

There were 9,233 objects large enough to be tracked and catalogued by the USSTRATCOM Space Surveillance Network. Of this total there were 2,927 payloads, along with 6,306 object classed as rocket bodies and debris.

Not to worry. NASA and related government entities are there to take care of us. Or are they?

Last year, for instance, a titanium rocket-motor casing weighing roughly 155 pounds (70 kilograms) was found near San Roque in Argentina. It was identified as debris from a third stage of an American Delta 2 booster that had been orbiting since October 1993.

Similarly, in July a metal pressure sphere and metal fragment fell into Brazil, the likely debris from a second stage of a Delta 2 booster that hurled the Mars Exploration Rover, Opportunity, toward the red planet a year earlier. source

If "trackable debris" is golf ball size or larger, how did this "Chinese Junk" sneak up on the ISS?

Are we expected to believe that this (Ya gotta just love this) "Chinese Junk" situation was only discovered and released to the MSM today?

We certainly do wish those in space the best of luck on this.

This! Enough already!

The talking heads on CNN have been hard at work with all the "less than a sunburn"-type statements to play way down the real danger.

Another false flag to divert attention from what's really happening?

This to divert attention from:

1) The radiation that is now threatening to harm every living thing in the United States forever.

2) The nuclear facility in Libya that was reported bombed yesterday.

3) The dumping of millions of gallons of radiated water into the Pacific Ocean.

4) The report of contamination 7,500,000 times the legal limit in the stricken reactors area.

5) The fact that the survivors of the earthquake/tsunami/nuclear/radiation event have yet to receive monetary aid - even though millions of dollars in donations have been raised.

6) The fact that in Japan's northern prefectures, (and probably everywhere in Japan) virtually all of the land-based food and now the sea-based food has been radiated to some degree.

And it goes on and on and on and on...

I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore!

Thank you for your time and consideration.

These challenges to life and sanity on this planet must be met with clear minds and sound hearts, so may your 2011 see you embracing its highest potential and onward through the fog!

In Peace & Light

tfw





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