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VIRTUALISATION Orbiting NASA tool bag seen with binoculars
VIRTUALISATION Orbiting NASA tool bag seen with binoculars | Orbiting NASA tool bag seen with binoculars |
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| by William Atkins | |
| Wednesday, 14 January 2009 | |
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During the mission of NASA’s STS-126 crew, on November 18, 2008, U.S. astronaut Heide Stefanyshyn-Piper was spacewalking as part of her job to fix the Solar Alpha Rotary Joint (SARJ) on the International Space Station. During her extravehicular activity (EVA), she noticed a bunch of grease in her tool bag. She reported, "I think we had a grease gun explode in the large bag, because there's grease in the bag.” [SpaceFlightNow.com: “Bag of tools escapes from spacewalker and floats away”] As she was attempting to clean up the mess, one of the bags floated away. She stated, “I guess one of my crew lock bags was not transferred and it's loose.” [SpaceFlightNow.com] The tool bag is now in low Earth orbit (LEO), and is considered space debris (junk). Because all objects in orbit about the Earth are subject to the (inward) gravitational force of the Earth they will slowly decay from their original orbit. Eventually, they will burn up in the atmosphere or, if large enough, survive their plunge and hit the Earth’s surface. Page two shows a YouTube video of the NASA tool bag in space. |
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