It's all fun and games until...
Posted on 03/16/2021 9:50:35 AM PDT by BenLurkin
It wasn’t the original plan for the pallet to be discarded like this. The failed launch of a Soyuz rocket in 2018, in which NASA astronaut Nick Hague and Roscosmos cosmonaut Alexey Ovchinin were forced to make an emergency landing in the Kazakh steppe, caused a disruption to the spacewalking schedule, leading to the leftover pallet.
NASA’s spacewalk on February 1, 2021, involving astronauts Mike Hopkins and Victor Glover, was notable in that it concluded a four-year effort to upgrade the space station’s batteries. These batteries store energy collected by solar arrays, but in 2011 NASA decided to make the switch from nickel-hydrogen batteries to lithium-ion batteries. Production of these batteries started in 2014, and the process of swapping them out began in 2016.
Normally, the old batteries would be placed inside an HTV and jettisoned from the ISS, and the items would mostly burn up on re-entry. But the [2018] Soyuz launch failure disrupted the pattern of spacewalks and the intended schedule such that, in late 2018, an HTV cargo freighter left the station without a battery pallet, according to SpaceFlightNow. The battery-replacement mission continued, and HTVs continued to depart the station with pallets, but now with an extra one perpetually attached to the station. With the mission done and no more HTVs coming (at least none of the old design—they’re being replaced by the HTV-X cargo spacecraft), mission planners had to jettison the pallet on its own.
(Excerpt) Read more at gizmodo.com ...
Good to know the ISS has a junk drawer like I do and can’t decide which of the batteries gathering in there work so toss them all. ;)
Oh I realize that, but they have thrusters that can compensate for that on the station easily enough.
They’re not recycled?
The even have the temporary addition to use as junk room:
An experimental module added to the International Space Station three years ago to test expandable module technologies has been cleared to remain on the station through the late 2020s.
In a July 30 presentation at the ISS Research and Development Conference here, Nathan Wells, an instrumentation lead for the Bigelow Expandable Activity Module (BEAM) at NASA, said the module’s on-orbit performance had exceeded expectations and that it had been cleared to remain on the station to 2028.
“Now it’s become more of a core facility,” he said of BEAM, which is now being used for stowage to free up volume on the cramped station.
Don’t these guys believe in recycling?......
There aren’t enough decimal points to describe what percentage of space has now been ‘polluted’, but I have no doubt millions are being spent on worrying about it.
It's all fun and games until...
Dura-celLO!
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.