[HN Gopher] Astronauts drop tool bag into orbit that you can see...
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Astronauts drop tool bag into orbit that you can see with
binoculars
Author : IndrekR
Score : 81 points
Date : 2023-11-14 07:14 UTC (15 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.usatoday.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.usatoday.com)
| Throwfi44 wrote:
| There is a rumour that several years ago some tools were dropped
| on purpose. Because astronaut did not liked to stay on orbit, and
| he/she wanted to return to Earth ahead of schedule.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| They could have just went on strike like skylab
| garblegarble wrote:
| Are you sure that's not a half-remembered version of Russian
| propaganda[1], where they tried to blame NASA Astronaut Serena
| Aunon-Chancellor with drilling holes into a Russian spacecraft,
| ostensibly so she could get sent back to earth early for
| medical treatment?
|
| They were trying at the time to deflect blame for what were
| clearly Russian manufacturing defects (especially in hindsight,
| given the number of defects and accidents Roscosmos have been
| responsible for lately).
|
| 1:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serena_Au%C3%B1%C3%B3n-Chancel...
| werdnapk wrote:
| In 2008, another tool bag was dropped.
| fouronnes3 wrote:
| Anyone got a link to an official report detailing what happened?
| The article is kinda light on details, but I assume this is a
| major mishap that can only happen if multiple things go wrong
| simultaneously? Everything m they do up there is a precisely
| choreographed dance so it would be interesting to read a
| technical report on that.
| EA wrote:
| https://blogs.nasa.gov/spacestation/2023/11/01/astronauts-en...
| thedaly wrote:
| There aren't very many details in that post either.
|
| > During the activity, one tool bag was inadvertently lost.
| Flight controllers spotted the tool bag using external
| station cameras. The tools were not needed for the remainder
| of the spacewalk. Mission Control analyzed the bag's
| trajectory and determined that risk of recontacting the
| station is low and that the onboard crew and space station
| are safe with no action required.
| Mizza wrote:
| There's a copypasta floating around - badum tish - giving an
| account of a particular US astronaut -
| https://futurism.com/the-byte/russia-threatens-nasa-astronau...
| - who caused this and a lot of other major problems.
| Accusations of misinformation, yada yada yada, but it sounds
| like it might have been a case of the roommate from hell, only
| in space.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1vXdRUIZ_EM
|
| whoops
| space_fountain wrote:
| The video was of a different incident right and the person
| mentioned in the first link hasn't been on the station in
| years?
| RetpolineDrama wrote:
| For a highly trained astronaut that "oops" in the video
| seemed extremely careless.
| hnbad wrote:
| My most charitable interpretation is that the astronaut
| thought the bag was attached to a tether given that it had
| a clip - which sadly wasn't attached to anything.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Highly trained astronaut doesn't mean much.
|
| See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisa_Nowak
|
| Nobody's perfect and nobody is infallible and that includes
| highly trained astronauts. Short of this being done on
| purpose (hard to believe to begin with) I'd just chalk it
| up to an accident.
| morelisp wrote:
| It's hard to have more failsafes on a single toolbag than
| "don't let go". The mission was successful (or it seems,
| partially successful, not due to loss of toolbag); losing the
| toolbag is the "one thing" that can go wrong without risking
| the real goal.
| bandyaboot wrote:
| I'm not familiar with how the *nauts tether themselves to the
| station, but I figured it would be something similar to
| safety tethers when working up high in precarious situations
| --2 tethers with only 1 allowed to be disconnected at any
| particular moment. I wouldn't have been surprised if the same
| thing were done for anything that they don't want to float
| away. But, perhaps that adds more complexity than it's worth.
| morelisp wrote:
| Tools don't need to be safe, though; you need to be safe
| from them. IANAA, but two tethers on your toolbag sounds
| like a great way to accidentally fuck up the two tethers on
| yourself.
| kridsdale3 wrote:
| Good news: The tools are secure.
|
| Bad news: You are condemned to die alone in space.
| godshatter wrote:
| In this case it worked out fine, but if the tool needed to
| complete the task was in the tool bag, things would have
| worked out differently. Bonus points if one of the tools
| needed to undo what they had started was also in the tool bag
| that got away.
| morelisp wrote:
| Why do you assume there's only one toolbag with the
| necessary tools? There's the kinds of things you have
| redundancy _of_ (tools, food, computers), to deal with the
| things you need redundancy _for_ (life, structural
| integrity, atmosphere).
| sieste wrote:
| Yes it's a bit light on details. But they do point out the most
| important facts, namely what gender the astronauts are and that
| it has not been officially confirmed whether the tool box
| contained a 10mm wrench. Personally, that's everything I needed
| to know about the situation.
| hotpotamus wrote:
| If you've ever worked on a modern car, you'd know the
| importance of the 10mm wrench. Maybe they had some Toyota
| guys consult on the ISS.
| sundvor wrote:
| Context, possibly:
| https://youtu.be/2jlxO6s5N6Q?si=7iled4EV7nWWyb-A
| hotpotamus wrote:
| Hadn't seen that one, but it is a bit of a meme. I'm not
| joking about working on cars though - my 2001 Toyota
| Corolla was full of 10mm bolts, and I have on occasion
| needed to pick one up from the hardware store only to
| find an empty spot between the 9mm and 11mm sockets.
| I_Am_Nous wrote:
| I love 10mm wrenches so much I bought a Japanese motorcycle
| :P I do so much better with whole numbers than fractions.
| Smoosh wrote:
| As well as the 10mm wrench, you may find it useful to
| have a 1cm spanner.
| Phrenzy wrote:
| Or a metric Crescent wrench.
| shaftway wrote:
| I know this is really tangential, but one of my favorite
| lines from cartoons as a kid was from an episode of Pinky
| and the Brain and it included this kind of wordplay.
|
| Their plan included forming a grunge band, which they
| called "Frog the Dry Widget" (a play on Toad the Wet
| Sproket).
| MrPatan wrote:
| Does it contain a drill?
| kube-system wrote:
| The 10mm reference is a meme. It is the most common size when
| working on a vehicle and is frequently misplaced.
|
| Although it's kind of strange to see that type of writing in
| USA Today... I thought I was reading Jalopnik or something.
| dclowd9901 wrote:
| Not strange at all. USA Today has always been basic news
| writing for basic people.
| brandall10 wrote:
| You forgot that what they dropped resembled a white satchel.
| neilv wrote:
| Both those and something else jumped out at me, for different
| reasons. I remember this story from newsprint days:
|
| https://fair.org/home/al-neuharths-front-page-sexism/
| wredue wrote:
| Imagine being upset by the mere mention of a persons gender.
| Christ you people are insufferable. Surely there are actually
| important things to be angry about.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Why aren't such things connected with a lanyard to the
| spacecraft?
| sonicanatidae wrote:
| They usually are. I suspect this was a missed step by someone.
| kurthr wrote:
| There's a giant swimming pool in Galveston which has a full
| underwater replica of the ISS for astronaut training. There
| are other scuba divers that work with the astronauts when
| they practice maintenance. One of their jobs (like the
| invisible waiter at a high end restaurant that makes dirty
| utensils go away) is to "retrieve" anything that the
| astronauts "put down". Often the maintenance jobs are multi-
| hour "space walks".
|
| Apparently, it basically happens every training and the
| divers take great joy in putting the items on the Lost Wall
| for everyone to see.
| kortex wrote:
| > One of their jobs (like the invisible waiter at a high
| end restaurant that makes dirty utensils go away) is to
| "retrieve" anything that the astronauts "put down".
|
| This is fascinating. I'm not quite following what is meant
| by retrieval though. I assume from context the divers
| aren't retrieving to _return_ the tools to the astronaut,
| and rather are emulating the drift that occurs in a
| frictionless vacuum? "Oops I set it 'down' and now it's
| 200m away".
|
| > Lost Wall
|
| I presume this is a "Wall of Shame" of sorts?
| Fwirt wrote:
| It seems that much like we become able to delegate tasks
| like setting down a coffee cup to our subconscious on
| Earth, after a while in microgravity astronauts become
| accustomed to "setting things down" in midair. It's could
| be that just like in a shop on the ground, "where did I
| set down that wrench" is an issue; an astronaut might
| "set down" a tool in midair on a spacewalk and forget
| that they're not in a confined space.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PVxaL8CAO4M
| kurthr wrote:
| Yes, they are providing the "experience of open space" :)
|
| And apparently there's nothing funnier than an
| embarrassed astronaut.
| smegger001 wrote:
| Why not put magnets on the tools handle so they can be
| quickly anchored near the working space when not in use?
| Similar to how we would set our tools down in full
| gravity astronauts could set the tool "down" without it
| floating away.
| iwontberude wrote:
| I am a layperson but I imagine it would be because then
| you have magnets capable of moving around the entire
| craft that you have to consider the interactions of.
| avianlyric wrote:
| That would require nearby surfaces to be ferromagnetic,
| which generally means steel. I doubt there's much exposed
| steel on the outside of the ISS. Steel is crazy heavy
| compared to other materials like titanium or aluminium,
| and given the cost of putting mass into space, it's
| unlikely there's much steel at all on the ISS.
| jmbwell wrote:
| There's one in Galveston in addition to the Neutral
| Buoyancy Lab at JSC in Clear Lake?
| zabzonk wrote:
| too many complicating cables? the astronauts already have two.
| bagels wrote:
| They usually are... you can see the unconnected tether in the
| video.
| 4gotunameagain wrote:
| This has happened two more times:
|
| https://www.businessinsider.com/nasa-astronauts-lost-items-i...
| kristianp wrote:
| They need a drone to go and pick these dropped items. How much
| fun that would be!
| crazygringo wrote:
| Now you've got me genuinely curious -- _does_ something like
| that exist? A space drone with gas propulsion and a grasping
| hand?
|
| It seems like it would be "relatively" simple, and useful for
| basic tasks that don't need a full human.
|
| I mean, now that you mention it, it really seems like that
| ought to be a thing, and that this would be a perfect use case
| for it. (Visual inspection of the ISS exterior would be
| another.)
| mikepurvis wrote:
| I think in theory Robotnaut 2 was supposed to be something
| that could eventually be that:
| https://www.nasa.gov/robonaut2/
|
| But going with a humanoid form factor made it overlay
| ambitious and all that complexity prevented it from being
| useful for the kinds of basic teleop + grab tasks you're
| envisioning.
| gumby wrote:
| > A space drone with gas propulsion and a grasping hand?
|
| Please, for this application you should use the term,
| "gripping hand".
|
| To be more substantive: now you mention it I haven't heard of
| such a device and I also wonder why. Makes sense for
| inspection (but how much happens?) though retrieving lost
| tools sound quite difficult.
|
| And though difficult, it seems like something worth becoming
| good at. Seems like a 1U might be big enough to hold a small
| drone and some things to retrieve. However you'd have to
| design your experiment carefully so that something you
| _failed_ to retrieve would rather soon reenter the atmosphere
| and not become dangerous orbiting junk. I don 't know how
| easy this would be: what if the drone tried to grab it and
| added a non-normal (i.e. sideways) component that put the
| target on a potentially destructive trajectory?
| ccooffee wrote:
| Aside: does the phrase "grasping hand" have a particular
| meaning in robotics jargon? (Or is there a different reason
| to avoid that terminology?)
|
| To me a "gripping hand" is intuitively something that
| continuously holds an item. It might require human
| intervention to work, such as positioning my camera onto a
| universal tripod mount. A "grasping hand" (or "grabbing
| hand") would be something that transitions from empty-
| handed to holding an item.
| r2_pilot wrote:
| In this case the GP is making a reference to "The Mote in
| God's Eye". An alien species has 2 hands that are similar
| to humans, but they also have a 3rd arm, which leads them
| to say, paraphrased, "on the one hand, on the other hand,
| on the gripping hand" since it's strongest.
| Groxx wrote:
| > _does something like that exist?_
|
| Technically: yes.
|
| Practically: it's so expensive to launch _anything_ , much
| less a cleanup-bot, that it basically isn't done outside of
| research. This will probably change, but costs are
| unavoidably high so it'll probably always be rare.
|
| There's a decent summary of the area in this, from a quick
| googling: https://www.cnn.com/2019/12/12/tech/space-junk-
| robot-esa-int...
|
| For small near-station use: I'm not sure! Some uses would
| certainly make sense, but I would be willing to bet that the
| risk of it going slightly too fast and damaging something
| makes it undesirable. It'll probably happen eventually, but
| I'd be a bit surprised if it is already a thing - most that
| I've seen have been armed machines that "walk" around the
| surface by grabbing things, which is much slower and safer.
| jstanley wrote:
| But if you lose something from the ISS, couldn't you chuck
| the drone out the airlock of the ISS and get it back before
| it's gone very far?
| nerpderp82 wrote:
| A drone would potentially be an ISS damaging missile. It
| could cause a whole lot more problems than it might
| solve. Ever have your foot nailed by an RC car? That
| times 100.
|
| Also its propulsion gas could also setup oscillations in
| the station itself. So a lot of math would have to go
| into counteract this little bee flying around outside the
| station.
| hydrogen7800 wrote:
| >does something like that exist? A space drone with gas
| propulsion and a grasping hand
|
| >Visual inspection of the ISS exterior
|
| Yes, minus the gripping hand. [0]
|
| "The sphere, which looks like an oversized soccer ball, was
| released by Mission Specialist Winston E. Scott during the
| STS-87 spacewalk and flew freely in the forward cargo bay for
| about 30 minutes."
|
| [0]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AERCam_Sprint
| dotnet00 wrote:
| Main concern with a free-flying thing using propellants is
| that something goes wrong causing it to smack into the
| station hard.
|
| That's why the Canadarm handles inspection/gripping work.
| Much less risky to have a migrating robotic arm.
| bouncycastle wrote:
| an R2D2 unit!
| p1esk wrote:
| Tool bag "valued at $100,000"? What could possibly be in there?
| munk-a wrote:
| Probably just regular stuff but of a high enough quality that
| we'd consider sending it to space? Defense and space equipment
| procurement is usually a lot more expensive than normal because
| 1) companies exploit the bidding system 2) you really don't
| want a screw driver that fails when you're re-attaching a solar
| panel to something floating in LEO since the run to the local
| Lowe's is going to be quite expensive.
| GauntletWizard wrote:
| Not to mention that the mere act of sending it to space costs
| $30,000 per pound of payload, so it was probably $10k of
| quality tools totaling 3lbs of weight.
| kolinko wrote:
| Also, it may include a cost of shipping to orbit.
| kube-system wrote:
| And also, a lot of it is low volume stuff, and fixed costs in
| manufacturing are huge. The reason the tools you buy at the
| home improvement store are cheap is because the fixed costs
| are spread out over thousands to millions of units.
| Design/labor/fixturing/tooling/etc can be brutal for low
| volumes.
|
| If you want to build a single Lego, the tooling could cost
| you hundreds of thousand of dollars.
| adhesive_wombat wrote:
| You think a Lego piece is expensive, you should see the
| total capital outlay required to make an apple pie from
| scratch!
| kridsdale3 wrote:
| One iPhone 16 is Five Billion Dollars. 50 million iPhones
| 16 can be made for $200 each.
| ericbarrett wrote:
| There's an old "just so" story that still pops up from time
| to time about how US astronauts found that normal ball point
| pens don't work without gravity, so NASA spent $bignum to
| have a contractor develop a "space pen." But the Russians
| used a pencil! Haha, look at these inefficient US government
| programs!
|
| Except it turns out that (a) the US did originally use
| pencils; and (b) the last things you want floating around a
| space station is conductive, flammable grit. Like pencil
| graphite.
|
| SciAm story about this:
| https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fact-or-
| fiction-n...
| kube-system wrote:
| And also, NASA did not pay Fisher to develop the pen, he
| already did.
| khuey wrote:
| Given the cost of launching stuff into space anything you want
| to have up there is worth at least thousands of dollars per
| pound.
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| Easy math: $100,000/$600 hammer
|
| 166.667 $600 hammers.
| jdminhbg wrote:
| Maybe the value includes the cost of putting it in orbit.
| gosub100 wrote:
| everything was probably made of solid titanium
| smegger001 wrote:
| Probably low weight high strength alloys and made to be easily
| griped by a spacesuits glove.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Tools that don't seize in a vacuum. Vacuum is a very rough
| place to work with tools because stuff tends to fuse.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vacuum_cementing
| ReptileMan wrote:
| The cost of lifting it there is probably 90% of the cost of the
| sum.
| renewiltord wrote:
| It happens now and then. I recall this happening a few decades
| ago. A very human video from then:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1vXdRUIZ_EM
| soniman wrote:
| I know what the historical present is but its use here is
| confusing. Just use "dropped." If the headline needs the present
| use "leave".
| yieldcrv wrote:
| > "The white, satchel-like tool bag slipped away from two
| astronauts during a rare, all-female spacewalk."
|
| Could have left that in drafts
| nerdponx wrote:
| Apparently the howling masses _love_ it when a woman messes up
| in space. Try to hold your lunch down while reading the
| comments here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hPV9QpC1JtU
| 9dev wrote:
| Oh wow, you're right. That's some first class misogynistic
| bullshit in pretty much every single comment.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| is it possible that today's spacewalk was paying homage to
| the one in 2008?
| ReptileMan wrote:
| So could have the NY times couple of years ago with
|
| > Why NASA's First All-Women Spacewalk Made History
|
| And we have articles in space.com just a week ago
|
| >Watch 2 NASA astronauts conduct 4th-ever all-female spacewalk
| today
|
| If all female walks are news, then fuck ups during all female
| space walks are also news worth pointing.
| moffkalast wrote:
| Kind of a shame they don't still have an MMU at the station for
| this kind of smash and grab job.
| KyleBerezin wrote:
| "That tool bag, valued at $100,000, circled the planet for months
| until meeting its fiery end after plunging to Earth and
| disintegrating. Experts believe last week's missing tool bag will
| share the same fate as it hurtles in the upper atmosphere, which
| has become increasingly littered."
|
| That makes no sense. Its like they are saying it burning up will
| 'litter' the upper atmosphere. I assume they meant to say that it
| being in orbit as debris is the litter, but I'd doubt it will be
| up there long due to its altitude and density.
| PretzelPirate wrote:
| > which has become increasingly littered
|
| This isn't saying that the toolbag has become litter in the
| upper atmosphere, but that the upper atmosphere, in general,
| has become littered by other things.
| advisedwang wrote:
| It's just poor sentence structure. "which has become
| increasingly littered" is a general statement about the upper
| atmosphere.
|
| It is true that litter in very low orbits is
| oversensationalized, though.
| fluoridation wrote:
| It's clumsily written. They combined two unrelated truths into
| the same sentence. It should have read
|
| > Experts believe last week's missing tool bag will share the
| same fate. It's currently hurtling through the upper
| atmosphere, which has become increasingly littered.
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