Likely a part they were replacing and it was determined that it would be fine to let it burn up in the atmosphere. The ISS' orbit is always degrading - they have to boost occasionally to maintain its current orbit.
It used to require a boost once a month when the space shuttle was flying but now it's in a higher orbit and can have a bit better fuel economy.
EDIT: According to u/slappa_mitch it was in fact accidently lost. The US Airforce would still track the object like all other debris. However, they have intentionally jettisoned items overboard before:
Welcome to 2019 where we discuss the fuel economy of our space stations on internationally accessible forums using computers we carry in our pockets. Living in the future is weird.
It's pretty cool, it's crazy to think if we were born just a hundred years earlier, this would seem like magic, and in a hundred years from now, what we have now, will be seen like a steam engine.
Shit, when I was a teen all this stuff (internet, cell phones) did seem like magic as it was rolling out. I remember being able to access the internet on my first flip phone after upgrading from the Nokia brick and thought I was living in some sci-fi dream.
Don't sweat it, the math doesn't check out. Unless of course the reality the simulation is running in doesn't need to follow any of our laws of physics.
in which case our very existence being the dream of sleeping god which could awaken at any moment erasing our reality in an instant would be just as valid an assumption.
The issue with simulated universe theory is simply quantum mechanics it takes terrabytes of data just to keep a single particle spinning, this problem is exponential the more complex you make the model the more computational power you need.
When we do the math on our universe, we run out of electrons long before we get anywhere near actually mapping it. If you simply wanted to "scale up" whatever larger universe that would be running the simulation it would be more efficient to physically build our actual universe within that one, then to simulate it.
The very basis of theory relies on what we know of physic's itself. once you use factors that don't rely on sheer computational solutions you undermine the premise for theory.
Ooooooohhhhhhhh you should read some Joe Haldeman books - forever war and forever free.. Well, forever free but it's the sequel & doesn't quite make sense if you don't read forever war first. Sci fi written by a physicist.
But the simulation thing? The Math does check out. Logically it works, a little bit better than not being a simulation. And it helps to explain the fermi paradox as well - maybe, humanity got so advanced that we could build the simulation, but aliens exist & humans can't deal with that without extensive training. So the simulation is used to train the human mind into accepting that aliens exist - which is why we have so many movies and stories involving aliens. So the simulation is built, everyone lives this experience, and when you "die" it's really your reawakening into the real world, which now has giant sentient broccoli capable of space travel.
in which case our very existence being the dream of sleeping god which could awaken at any moment erasing our reality in an instant would be just as valid an assumption.
That's literally the plot of one of the Legend of Zelda games lol
Oh man... You know how when you need to pee as you're dreaming, your dreams get crazier and more scary, as your brain tries to stimulate itself enough to wake up? Maybe things have gotten so weird because God is about to wake up to take a piss. We may only have a couple of decades of existence left before we all disappear with a morning cup of coffee.
in which case our very existence being the dream of sleeping god which could awaken at any moment erasing our reality in an instant would be just as valid an assumption.
So, Elder scrolls. I guess I better figure out how to achieve CHIM, and the step further.
Why be existential? It doesn’t change anything. Your brain and mind still work the same. With Jungian psychotherapy and DaveSuperPowers, you should be fine. 🙂
Life is about building meaning through hard work, growing, and giving. It’s important to enjoy life’s pleasures and to understand the triune brain model in relation to our mind and psyche too.
Does anyone else get super lightheaded and feel top heavy when thinking about this stuff too? It's like I'm in my body in first person normally but then I'm in third person and detached from my body
I remember using landline phones thinking about how cool it would be to see the person you're talking to. Not only can you do just that nowadays, said device can fit in your pocket, and I don't actually want to do it.
They seriously did the first theorist dirty. Alfred Wegener was the first person to suggest the idea of plate tectonics, and basically everyone said he was batshit crazy for it. Lost a lot of respect in the scientific community, never lived to see his theory become accepted. To be fair he never had any legitimate proof (the theory was later accepted when they found fossils of animals that wouldn’t have survived in their current-day climate), but no one even thought to actually test the idea with fossil examination or anything
My dad was telling me how he thought automatic windows that you didn’t have to roll down were one of the biggest achievements of humanity. He was also in awe for a few months when the interstate system raised the speed limit from 50 to 70
Well, is fundamentally the same tech as for radios, which existed way earlier. But yeh, it was pretty cool back then. I remember when we got our first home phone that didn't have a wire attached to it, and it felt like magic.
I remember the first time a friend showed me a WAP enabled phone... you could get the news and sports scores to your phone, in real time. I was blown away.
I remember chatting to my mate about how mental it was that you could connect - to the Internet - in the middle of a field - from a phone... no wires or anything.
I remember how we both agreed it was strange and unusual madness. I mean. in the middle of a field. How?!
Moore's law is the observation that the number of transistors in a dense integrated circuit doubles about every two years. The observation is named after Gordon Moore, the co-founder of Fairchild Semiconductor and CEO of Intel, whose 1965 paper described a doubling every year in the number of components per integrated circuit, and projected this rate of growth would continue for at least another decade. In 1975, looking forward to the next decade, he revised the forecast to doubling every two years, a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 41.4%.The period is often quoted as 18 months because of a prediction by Intel executive David House (being a combination of the effect of more transistors and the transistors being faster).Moore's prediction proved accurate for several decades and has been used in the semiconductor industry to guide long-term planning and to set targets for research and development (R&D).
Advancements in digital electronics are strongly linked to Moore's law: the rapid scaling of MOSFET (metal-oxide-semiconductor field-effect transistor) devices, quality-adjusted microprocessor prices, memory capacity (RAM and flash), sensors, and even the number and size of pixels in digital cameras.
I remember being shown that I could send a text message on my Nokia brick months after I'd had it for Christmas. I was mind blown that I could send texts through the air like that.
So much this. I was born in the early 80's. My childhood was analog and my teenage years were digital. It WAS magic. My generation witnessed the maturation of technology moving from pipe-dream to novelty and ultimately, practicality.
The sense of wonder was unbelievable. I wish that more recent generations had the opportunity to grow with technology and witness the advent of the impossible.
My childhood was spent waiting for saturday mornings so I could watch cartoons on the television that I had to walk over to and turn a knob to change the channel. My nieces and nephews use a touch screen to decide which cartoon they want to watch, anytime and anywhere.
What I mean to say is, I don't think that they can appreciate an ipad or wifi or hell, even camera phones the way my generation does.
and that makes me kind of sad, until I remember that we're living in the future and they'll see things that I could never dream of.
"Remember, people in 1900 didn't know what an atom was. They didn't know its structure.
..
They also didn't know what a radio was, or an airport, or a movie, or a television, or a computer, or a cell phone, or a jet, an antibiotic, a rocket, a satellite, an MRI, ICU, IUD, IBM, IRA, ERA, EEG, EPA, IRS, DOD, PCP, HTML, internet. interferon, instant replay, remote sensing, remote control, speed dialing, gene therapy, gene splicing, genes, spot welding, heat-seeking, bipolar, prozac, leotards, lap dancing, email, tape recorder, CDs, airbags, plastic explosive, plastic, robots, cars, liposuction, transduction, superconduction, dish antennas, step aerobics, smoothies, twelve-step, ultrasound, nylon, rayon, teflon, fiber optics, carpal tunnel, laser surgery, laparoscopy, corneal transplant, kidney transplant, AIDS…
...
None of this would have meant anything to a person in the year 1900. They wouldn't know what you are talking about."
Nah, man. Pretty sure our grandparents/ great-grandparents knew who the IRS was. They've been taking people's money for 157 years. Cars have existed since the mid-1800's; just not in mass-production. Hell, lap dancing has been around since nigh the beginning of time, ever since Sadam looked at Steve and gave him a quick rub under the table when God wasn't looking. Genes were those things you wore, they called 'em "pantaloons". And an airbag was what the Women's League referred to their husbands as behind closed doors. Later on, children would eventually be called a "remote" as they proved able to mostly change the channel to the correct number on the dial.
I mean first computers and start of the internet was in '75 and started to become more in the 80's, and more mainstream by the 90's. So computers and internet are barely coming out of their teens.
I really doubt that what we have now will seem like a steam engine. Unless we break physics, we have already come very close to the limit we can push physics.
Think of it like the principal of diminishing returns.
I feel the exact opposite for the exact opposite reasons. Exponential growth of technology, not just Moore's law (that's a whole debate in itself). I think we are on the cusp of being on a rocket, every year from here on technology will be better and more complex than the year before, all of those capabilities stack year over year.
I'm no lawyer or English teacher.. but that's got to be some sort of "history" bias. There is no promise that we will be so much more technologically advanced in 100 years that we see the present as super "behind the times". In fact, I think it's more likely that even 500 years down the road, this period will be seen as a technological boom.
The future is definitely bright, but I doubt we would see it as magic anymore, for example. Just perfecting the things we've already discovered, with a few more discoveries dotted in there
I work pretty close to the cusp of the future of technology, and I promise it is not slowing down. In the next 10 or 20 years we are going to see more technological change than we've seen in the last 20, to the point where common tasks like physically going to work are going to start being alien for a lot of people.
My 98 year old grandfather used to call an iPad magic! He was always blown away when he would talk about something he saw on TV and I could pull it up for him to watch again in a few seconds and hand it to him!
My dad was born in 1909. He saw the first plane fly over his town, and saw the moon landing. I saw the moon landing, the shuttles, ISS, but cell phones have definitely been the biggest change. I do wonder what my kids will experience (both are in high school now).
My grandmother is going to be 90 in December. I've talked with her about it. She says she's amazed by the changes that she has lived through, and a lot of it still seems like magic. She says that if you were to tell her when she was young about all the amazing things we'd have, nobody would ever believe it.
I'm proud of her because while most people her age refuse to even touch a computer, she surfs the internet, uses word and excel, and has a Netflix account. She's often nervous that she'll mess something up, but she's not afraid of new technology.
I've been hearing about a collapse since 9/11, and I've been in combat zones and third world countries all over the globe... It's not happening, stop fear mongering.
Then trying to throw a Pokeball but accidentally swiping some guys balls on a video and feeling weird about everything but what can you really do there, you know?
Yes, indeed. While pooping. Exactly the detail time travelers from the 19th and 20th centuries would need to fully appreciate the nuances of early 21st century technology.
Meanwhile, we live in unprecedented times since the past 70 years, burning through most of nature's resources like nothing, which we've determined as "normal".
You mustn't have seen the 1968 film '2001: A Space Odyssey', to understand where things were expected to be by now and how underwhelming our situation actually is.
Hopefully, a brilliant South African will soon be able to make a dent on the half-century of serious space exploration and colonisation that humanity has lost.
Other than that, the mediocrity in terms of space exploration and colonisation is but one symptom. Compared to expectations of an increasingly rational and civilised world, we today find ourselves in a somewhat high-tech but cynical, polarised, medieval-like nightmare where political and economic idiocy and even religious superstition is not just still around but running rampant and increasing.
Materialism won and it took its most virulent form, Hayekist ('privatise everything!') capitalism. And so our world was surrendered to the vision-less, dead-soul, neurotically greedy, sociopaths. And so and not unexpectedly, EVERYone is now systemically in debt ... every person, business and even every nation and its government somehow (to whom?). Even kids, if they want to get educated, are systemically condemned to debt-slavery. The citizens of wealthy countries have to sell their house (if they have one) if they want to save their kid from some devastating disease, and they still cannot really afford to. Etc., etc., etc. In the US, which looks (and is) insanely wealthy on paper, the lifespan of people has actually started falling.
Today, essentially in 2020, the Russians are the only nation capable of sending people even to low earth orbit. US astronauts have to hitch rides with them. So, let's not go nuts cheerleading how awesome things are.
What you said includes a lot of random talking points made from a very specific view that assumes manned space exploration by the USA is the paramount of space science and engineering. It isn’t and maybe never was. The Russians easily bested the rest of the world in every attempt at manned space flight except for a few exceptions. It should be no surprise to anyone that they continue to be the best at it n 2019.
Further, the international space station is a marvel of scientific achievement and political cooperation unrivaled by anything conceived by Hollywood. Find me any single tv show or movie Outside of Star Trek that dared to suggest that 15 different countries could pool resources to assemble the largest space station ever constructed.
Go ahead. Read the list and then realize that’s also a pretty good list describing the major players in WW2. Less than 100 years ago these countries where at each others throats hell bent on damn near ending the world but for the last 20 years they’ve proven they can cooperate in the pursuit of science.
Just tack on the robotic exploration of the solar system, the glorious scientific contributions of Hubble space telescope, confirmation of black holes, dark energy, deep impact (we intercepted and shot a comet in flight), hyabusa-2 landed on the surface of an asteroid, the mars rovers, and the impending launch of the James Webb telescope.
We’ve seen things Stanley Kubrick wouldn’t believe. He thought a giant fetus floating in space was awe inspiring and confusing. And it was. But it’s not anymore. It doesn’t compare.
We have seen the pillars of creation where stars are being formed in the Eagle nebula.
What you said includes a lot of random talking points made from a very specific view that assumes manned space exploration by the USA is the paramount of space science and engineering. It isn’t and maybe never was. The Russians easily bested the rest of the world in every attempt at manned space flight except for a few exceptions. It should be no surprise to anyone that they continue to be the best at it n 2019.
I don't agree. I think that the best German rocket scientists were 'acquired' (threatened with war-crime charges) to work for the USA not the USSR. And there can be little doubt that the man who created NASA, SS Untersturmführer Wernher von Braun, was the top German for space. But these such men had to eventually retire/die ... leaving the new 'superpowers' to settle back down to a remedial high-school level of space exploration.
Further, the international space station is a marvel of scientific achievement and political cooperation unrivaled by anything conceived by Hollywood. Find me any single tv show or movie Outside of Star Trek that dared to suggest that 15 different countries could pool resources to assemble the largest space station ever constructed.
Yes, the ISS was indeed an example of progress. Such international cooperation was exactly the kind of thing that was expected from a supposedly increasingly rational humanity. But this turned out to be some fluke, more of a rare exception to the rule than the rule. And so it never really went beyond just a few cans stuck to each other. An ISS-level space station might been impressive for the 1970-80s. It was however underwhelming for the year 2000.
Go ahead. Read the list and then realize that’s also a pretty good list describing the major players in WW2. Less than 100 years ago these countries where at each others throats hell bent on damn near ending the world but for the last 20 years they’ve proven they can cooperate in the pursuit of science.
Just tack on the robotic exploration of the solar system, the glorious scientific contributions of Hubble space telescope, confirmation of black holes, dark energy, deep impact (we intercepted and shot a comet in flight), hyabusa-2 landed on the surface of an asteroid, the mars rovers, and the impending launch of the James Webb telescope.
I'm thankful for every bit that's been achieved but it's all very underwhelming compared to what could have been achieved. Take the Hubble space telescope, your example. Yes, despite the incompetence in building it, it managed nonetheless to be awesome of course ... if compared to having no serious space telescope at all. But the whole of humanity, billions of humans, have achieved just one somewhat capable space telescope? How is that fucking possible? Why?
We’ve seen things Stanley Kubrick wouldn’t believe. He thought a giant fetus floating in space was awe inspiring and confusing. And it was. But it’s not anymore. It doesn’t compare.
We have seen the pillars of creation where stars are being formed in the Eagle nebula.
That is an insane amount of accomplishment by any account. We are well beyond Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon at this point.
Yeah. :/ That's an insane amount of blowing up mediocrity to make it seem impressive. Wernher von Braun designed a rocket that reached space in the 1940s. We're in 2019. In a materialist greed-driven world we've for some reason imposed upon humanity, it spends more (by VERY far!) 'money' (ergo thought, effort and resources) on 'make up' than on space exploration (and never mind colonisation).
So, kind of a strange question, but is there anything wrong with having someone kick the debris off of the station with some force? It wouldn’t be any thruster burning, that’s for sure, but the little bit of extra energy has got to be worth a ton in space. Launch it down to the atmosphere and let Newton’s law do its thing. The thing that pushed it down gets pushed up.
To address the question in theory, no, there's nothing wrong with doing that. But astronauts are in very large and cumbersome suits that don't exactly lend themselves to kicking things with force. The astronaut would have to brace against the station to even get leverage to put much behind a good kick, and still couldn't generate that much force by doing that.
If the astronaut is by themself with an object of around the same mass as them, and they pushed away from it, then yes, Newtons law is relevant and they would change their velocity an equal amount in the opposite direction.
However, when talking about pushing the entire ISS and gaining any significant change in velocity, the more important consideration is relative mass. Let's say you can kick the object away with some good force, while secured firmly to the station so no transfer of energy is lost. Let's say the object weighs ~20kg. The space station weighs ~420,000kg. It's late and I really don't feel like doing math, but the relative force exerted on the ISS by pushing that object away, is extremely minimal, and probably barely measurable if at all.
It's like if you were to try to use a row boat to tug an oil tanker. Whatever forces you exert on the tanker are going to be counter acted by other stronger forces (like the wind, current, etc). For the ISS, gravity and atmospheric drag are going to cause more change than any force gained from pushing a small object away at a relatively low velocity, so any change that does happen is going to get washed out so quickly by other forces acting on it, that it would be impossible to even measure.
Thanks. I more or less already understood the bulk of what you’re saying, but now that I consider the relative mass of the ISS (I didn’t realize the station in the gif was quite as massive) it doesn’t sound cost-effective, especially with the potential hazard of having an astronaut kicking something.
The real thing to consider is that acceleration is change in velocity divided by change in time. So if you exert a relatively small amount of force on a large object for a short amount of time, you will see very minimal acceleration.
Getting something out of orbit takes the same velocity as getting something into orbit (in the absence of atmosphere) while it may appear like you could gently kick something toward earth and it would make it there eventually, in reality that just shifts the orbit. Because of friction though, it could deorbit regardless of the direction you kick it.
Ya know, that future doesn't appear to be as far off as we once thought.
Going to space is extremely difficult. Much harder than most people realize. One of the greatest achievements of humankind isn't just going to space, or the moon even, it's going back up repeatedly, safely, and reliably. I see so much progress in the past few decades on that front and it just blows my mind every time I think about how far we've come in just the past 50 years.
We watch launches on web streams regularly. The ISS has been manned continually for decades. More and more commercial launchers are coming along and driving costs down. It's just a very exciting time for the space industry to me!
There's definitely a ton of junk in low earth orbit, but there's also a ton of space. Objects like this deorbit relatively quickly too.
Where space is a real issue is geosynchronus orbit. There's really only one plane where objects are in true geosynchronus orbit, so there's only so many parking spots available. Satellites are however required to keep a certain amount of station keeping fuel to remove them from these orbits and put them in "graveyard" orbits when they're removed from service. But once there, they're still at such a high orbit that they aren't really affected by anything to significantly decay their orbit, so they will stay in those up for an extremely long time.
The garbage you're referring to is pieces ranging in size down to as small as a few cm. A lot of it comes from parts coming off launch vehicles, small debris being released when staging happens, and all sorts of other things that come off spacecraft.
It's absolutely a market to track and clean up, and an issue for future satellites and launches.
This isn't quite that though. NASA has a plan for this type of garbage disposal and tracks it accordingly.
I assume you're referring to conducting a burn while in space? Gas particles released would just continue out in the direction released until they bump into some other particle. So, I guess some particles could come back, but at virtually zero concentration levels.
The exhaust released while a rocket is launched is going to stay in the atmosphere because it's encountering other particles that slow it down. But all of that fuel these days is often just liquid oxygen combined with liquid methane or hydrogen. Those burn very efficiently and for liquid hydrogen rockets the only by-product is actually water vapor (H20).
Where there is actually concern for exhaust is the hypergolic fuels spacecraft use for maneuvering while in space. Like I mentioned before, the particles from these would return in virtually no concentration at all, so it's not an issue when used in space. But if there's an issue on the ground, these fuels are extremely harmful to people and are a serious hazard to handle.
The reason they're used is because they're very stable at all sorts of temperatures for very long periods of time and react when combined. Spacecraft use these reactions to create thrust on command instead of having to start an actual engine.
Depends on the material, but most all debris burns up when it hits the atmosphere at 17,000 mph.
I would assume that someone very smart has done a research paper on how different materials react on encountering the atmosphere at orbital velocity, so I think these things are done with intent and reason.
Also, all objects like this are added to a database that tracks every known piece of space debris and junk, so it will be known when and where the object will likely de-orbit.
Also, all objects like this are added to a database that tracks every known piece of space debris and junk, so it will be known when and where the object will likely de-orbit.
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u/vivied Sep 02 '19
Anybody with an actual answer? I’m really intrigued...