Euro space truck prepares for fiery death Space truck Johannes Kepler will today undock from the International Space Station ahead of a fiery death above the Pacific. The European Space Agency's second Automated Transfer Vehicle (ATV) has done its duty and is now packed with 1200kg of waste and unwanted hardware which will be destroyed when the 10-tonne vehicle burns …
Well, I'm a hacker, and so are many other folks here. The word means "someone who finds clever ways of doing things that are not supposed to be possible". It appears you would be happier in a world without hackers. Might I suggest joining a stone-age tribe in Borneo? Don't worry, we hackers will be careful not to drop space hardware on your head. Promise.
"humans still manage to accumulate over a tonne of unwanted crap to chuck away."
Considering the location of the ISS, It's either stow it for disposal, live with it like a overflowing (floating - A whole new defination in itself) litter tray & the smell or go anal retentive & keep it all in.
You are the Queen, as clearly you never defacate & I claim my £5 (as that appears to be the current trend from the Megan Fox firing story).
PH Because she may well know about taking it up the Khyber.
I think he meant that a lot of the Russian docking system will fall into the water instead of being completely burnt up in the air.
Makes you long for the good old days of space shuttles, OK they still had a shitload of garbage to bring back and presumably put straight into the incinerator but I too regret the loss of those solar panels on the disposable euro space truck.
... then it would be just as easy to throw something up.
The ISS is going around the Eath at about 7900 metres per second. If you stand on the outside of the ISS and fast bowl a cricket ball downwards, the ball will go about 40 metres per second downwards but it will keep going 7900 metres per second around the earth. The cricket ball will be in a slightly elliptical orbit that is very close to the ISS.
To make the cricket ball go down, you have to throw it out the back of the ISS hard enough to make a significant dent in that 7900 metres per second. The result will still be an elliptical orbit, but the lowest point will be in thick enough atmosphere to slow the ball still further.
You missed one of the most interesting tidbits...
Kepler is equipped with a REBR that will record some data during the destructive reentry breakup. Then, when the recorder finally breaks free of the flaming fireball of debries, at about 18km altitude, it's supposed to make an Iridium telephone call to send the data back to headquarters (presumably in a dormant volcano somewhere).
Cool.
please dont flame me for this, im actually quite intrested in knowing, what would be the down side of pointing this crap towards the sun?
obviously it would take some amount of shove to get it towards the sun and out of our gravity well but is it not possible?
You could just have a super sized space Skip with some cheap arse boosters on them to fire it at the sun once every decade or so.....
just a thought
You can't just point and shove.
Getting into the sun means slowing the orbital speed of the stuff relative to the sun, which means making a dent in an orbital velocity of 30 km/s or so. Which needs lots of fuel - which has to be lifted to the space station, thus needing even more fuel. It's easier to make a dent into the 7km/s of the ISS orbital velocity for a "back to Earth" manoeuver.
would it not be possible to align its trajectory so that they could push it towards earth, get some gravity assist, but miss the earth an head towards the sun, obviously they would need some extra thrust.
My assumption was that to remain in orbit its speed forward needs to match gravity down, as you said, by slowing down would it not be pulled at by gravity back down to earth?
sorry im completely ignorant in such matters, assuming we could do that i cant think of any other negatives
i know doing this for earth based waste would be too expencive, but the stuff in question is already there so was just curious.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
