Weighing 2.9 tons and traveling at 4.8 kilometers per second, this pile of old batteries is now the heaviest piece of garbage that has been removed from the International Space Station.
The pallet is full of nickel-hydrogen batteries and will remain in low Earth orbit for the next two to four years “before being burned harmlessly into the atmosphere,” according to a NASA statement. SpaceFlightNow reports that the pallet is “the most massive object that has ever been removed from the advanced place in orbit.”
NASA spokeswoman Leah Cheshier confirmed this.
“The outer pallet was the largest object – massively – that was ever removed from the International Space Station at 2.9 tons, more than double the mass of the tank of the first ammonia maintenance system abandoned by the Clay Anderson spacecraft during the STS-118 mission in 2007, ”Cheshier wrote in an email.
NASA ballistics officials “indicate no threat” of the spacecraft crashing into other space objects, but “this element, like all of them, will be tracked by the U.S. Space Command,” he added.
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It was not the original plan to discard the pallet like that. He launch failed of a Soyuz rocket in 2018, in which NASA astronaut Nick Hague and Roscosmos cosmonaut Alexey Ovchinin were forced to make an emergency landing in the Kazakh steppe, causing an interruption in the space walk schedule leading to the leftover pallet.
NASA’s spacewalk on February 1, 2021, featuring astronauts Mike Hopkins and Victor Glover, was remarkable as it concluded a four-year effort to upgrade the space station’s batteries. These batteries store the energy collected by solar matrices, but in 2011 NASA decided to switch from nickel-hydrogen batteries to lithium-ion batteries. Production of these batteries began in 2014 and the process of changing the batteries began in 2016.
This effort required four missions to supply the Japanese H-II Transfer Vehicle (HTV) spacecraft, 13 different astronauts and 14 spacewalks, in which 48 nickel-hydrogen batteries were replaced by 24 lithium-ion batteries. .
Normally, old batteries would be placed inside an HTV and released from the ISS, and items would be burned primarily upon re-entry. But the failure of the Soyuz launch altered the spacewalk pattern and planned schedule in such a way that in late 2018, an HTV cargo ship left the station without a battery pallet, according to SpaceFlightNow. The battery replacement mission continued and the HTVs continued to leave the station with pallets, but now with one more permanently connected to the station. With the mission done and no more HTV arriving (at least none of the old design, which will be replaced by the HTV-X spacecraft), mission planners had to undo the pallet on their own.
So they did on Thursday, March 11, when mission controllers in Houston used the Canadarm2 robotic arm to “release an external pallet charged with old nickel-hydrogen batteries into Earth orbit.” seconds at NASA. The object was released approximately 267 miles (427 km) above the earth’s surface.
“It used to be a big problem to launch things from the ISS because there were very few satellites they were downstairs [at altitudes below 250 miles (400 km)], “Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, he explained in an email. “This is no longer so true with a lot of cubes and Starlinks launched recently during the rise of the orbit. So I have concerns. “
To which he added:I don’t immediately see what else they could have done except fly an entire extra HTV mission just to get rid of it ”.
According to the European Space Agency, around 34,000 objects larger than 10 cm are currently orbiting the Earth, in addition to millions of smaller objects, such as tools and pieces of spacecraft. The volume of objects in space, both functional and non-functional, is constantly increasing, causing concern possible collisions and even more orbital remains.
This post was updated to include comments made by Jonathan McDowell.