Good Morning. Was it Chicken Little that said “the Sky is falling, run for your lives?” Well now we have a reason to believe Chicken Little. NASA in their clean up stages on the space station decided to jettison some debris. Here is that story: Recycling rubbish NASA style: turn it into space junk IRENE KLOTZ IN CAPE CANAVERAL A SPACEWALKING NASA astronaut pitched two large pieces of obsolete equipment off the International Space Station and into orbit yesterday. A 1,400lb, refrigerator-sized reservoir that contains ammonia was cast overboard during a spacewalk by Clay Anderson, a station flight engineer, and his commander, the Russian cosmonaut Fyodor Yurchikhin. Mr Anderson also tossed away a 212lb camera mounting.
NASA expects any debris to land in the ocean, but calculated a 1:5,000 chance that it might injure or kill a person. (That just happens to be the same odds as a Golfer has of making a hole in one shot. Yesterday 4 recorded holes in one were shot in 4 different areas of the world…)The ammonia tank is expected to remain in orbit for at least 300 days and the agency will issue warnings if it becomes a threat during re-entry.
NASA normally frowns on littering in space, but found no better option than to discard the tank, which was no longer needed for cooling, and the obsolete video equipment.
With just 14 missions to the space station remaining before the space shuttles are retired in 2010, engineers could not make room in a shuttle cargo bay to transport the gear back to Earth. So Mr Anderson, who was making his first spacewalk, positioned himself at the end of the station's outstretched robotic arm, leaned back and heaved the rubbish overboard.
"Nice work," said the astronaut Chris Cassidy from Mission Control Centre in Houston Texas. Television cameras anchored outside the station showed the huge white tank tumbling away from the station as it flew over the Atlantic Ocean.
NASA is concerned that the free-flying debris might strike the station and as a precaution raised its orbit by 4.5 miles to give the junk a wide berth. Both items will be tracked by radar until they tumble from space and burn up in Earth's atmosphere.
The video mounting is expected to disintegrate completely, but pieces of the ammonia tank as large as 39lb could survive and strike Earth. The third station crew member, Oleg Kotov, remained aboard the orbital complex during the operation to work the station's robot arm, the first Russian cosmonaut to do so.
In addition to discarding the old gear, the spacewalkers cleaned debris off a docking port so that the complex will be ready for new laboratories built by Europe and Japan. They also replaced a faulty electronics switch in the mobile transporter that moves the robot arm to various work locations along the station's exterior support beams. The $100 billion (£49 billion) outpost, a project of 16 nations, is a little over half-finished.
Additional work on the station is planned next month during a servicing call of up to ten days by the crew of the space shuttle Endeavour, who will include the teacher-astronaut Barbara Morgan. Well I for one am happy that NASA is at least tracking the debris. I mean I would hate to be walking around in May of 2008 and a 39 pound piece of re-entry Space garbage knock the smile of my space with a single blow. So if you see a person pointing up in the sky say in about 300 days or so…beware it might just be Chicken Little and he might just be saving your life.
Have a wonderful day.
A huge Hug and a handful of pats
Mart
