ORBITAL DEBRIS SAFELY PASSES INTERNATIONAL SPACE STATION

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A small piece of Cosmos 2251 satellite debris safely passed by the International Space Station at 2:38a.m. EDT, Saturday March 24 allowing the six Expedition 30 crew members onboard the orbiting complex to exit their Soyuz spacecraft and resume normal activities.

The crew sheltered in the two Soyuz spacecraft as a precaution, the third time in station history that a crew has had to shelter in place due to the possibility of a conjunction with orbital debris and the first since June 2011. NASA’s Expedition 30 Commander Dan Burbank and Russian cosmonauts Anton Shkaplerov and Anatoly Ivanishin were in their Soyuz TMA-22 spacecraft attached to the Poisk module on the space-facing side of the Zvezda service module, while cosmonaut Oleg Kononenko, NASA’s Don Pettit and Andre Kuipers of the European Space Agency were in their Soyuz TMA-03M spacecraft on the Earth-facing side of the Zarya module.

The piece of debris was a remnant of a Feb. 10, 2009 collision between the dormant Cosmos 2251 satellite and an operational Iridium 33 communications satellite. The collision added about 2,000 trackable items to the orbital debris catalog. At the time of closest approach, the debris was moving from left to right in front of the station at an estimated overall miss distance of between 11 and 14 kilometers and a radial miss distance of 120 meters.

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15 Comments

  1. focusing on space exploration would be kinda pointless since you cant live out there for too long and the money required to bring people out there is expensive

  2. Pointless? You are living on a small island that will sink soon. You dont think its a good idea to go find other islands?
    And money is not the issue. If you are in a burning building, you dont say its too expensive to evacuate. You do everything you can, its live or die.
    You are thinking too small. We can terraform Mars. We can mine ice from comets to produce fuel and oxygen, extending mission time in space. And eventually we can travel to other solarsystems and terraform other planets.

  3. Goverments. Countries.
    The generation who lived through the world wars is still alive, and they were completely traumatised and fucked up by the wars. They run the show, and they made a insane effort to prepare to insane wars in the future. Thats the legacy we are left with.
    Humanity worries about a war with the tribe next door.
    In national level, and in family level, and in individual level. You cant say you dont worry about crime and violence at all.

  4. This is worse than the cheap Hollywood low budget movie. With all these billions of plunked down money to the Space Agency, all we get are a stupid office camera, low res station space feeds and some 3D graphics

  5. So the ISS, a space station dedicated to the research of space doesn't have cameras in all areas covering the outside views of the station? "Hey boss we just saw an alien craft on the way to Earth!" "Thanks guys, do you have the alien craft on video?" "No, sorry."

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