(Newser)
– Last Thursday was apparently Garbage Day at the International Space Station, which delivered a pallet of 2.9 tons of used nickel-hydrogen batteries. It is the largest mass of space debris that has triggered the ISS and NASA wrote that the spacecraft “will move away from the station safely and will orbit the Earth in two to four years before burning harmlessly in the atmosphere “. In terms of size, a NASA representative tells Gizmodo that the piece is “more than double the mass of the tank of the early ammonia maintenance service system that drove out spaceman Clay Anderson during the mission. STS-118 in 2007 “. Syfy explains that this was not the original plan. The Japanese disposable H-II Transfer Vehicle (HTV) vessels were dedicated to replacing those old batteries with lithium-ion batteries and each HTV would return to Earth with a battery pack on board. The objects would burn during re-entry, with the rest falling in the South Pacific.
As for why this pallet was abandoned from the ISS, blame the “wavy” effect of an emergency landing in 2018 that disrupted the ISS’s elimination schedule, reports Syfy . Spaceflight Now explains that astronaut Nick Hague had to be involved in the battery changes, but his failure to get to the ISS at that time caused a battery pack that was not recovered by an HTV. Bad Astronomy blogger Phil Plait is not convinced of the long-term success of this plan, but he tweeted Thursday, “This seems dangerous to me (haha, a pun given the circumstances). It looks big and dense and is unlikely to burn completely.” Astronomer Jonathan McDowell agreed on an answer, piulant“Yes. On the other hand, for example, Tiangong-1 weighed 7500 kg, much larger. But I would say the dense EP9 is dense, it’s worrisome, even at the lower end of the concern.” The U.S. Space Command will keep an eye on things. (Read more stories from the International Space Station.)