Posted on 09/19/2006 8:53:59 AM PDT by Kaslin
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. – NASA mission controllers are tracking a mystery object hovering between the space shuttle Atlantis and Earth, and traveling at roughly the same speed as the orbiter, agency officials said Tuesday.
“Right now they’re just tying to figure out exactly what it is, how far away it is,” NASA spokesperson Kimberly Harle told SPACE.com. “It’s pretty much assessing the whole situation.”
arle said that at 2:45 a.m. EDT (0645 GMT), just after Atlantis completed a check of its reaction control thrusters, the instrumentation and communications officer at NASA’s shuttle Mission Control room at Johnson Space Center noted an object between the orbiter and Earth, and traveling at about the same speed of the spacecraft.
Flight controllers are now using video cameras mounted along Atlantis’ robotic arm and payload bay to survey visible areas of the orbiter, including its wing leading edges and other vital heat shield areas, Harle said.
“Everything is still under assessment,” Harle said.
For now, Atlantis’ STS-115 shuttle crew will not stow their Ku-band antenna – the primary video and data link to Earth – to allow flight controllers to continue to study the object.
NASA is broadcasting Atlantis’ STS-115 mission to the ISS live via NASA TV. You are invited to follow the shuttle's progress using SPACE.com's NASA TV feed, which is available by clicking here or using the button at the left.
I heard the Pentagon invested a lot of money into Remote Sensing... wait, maybe that was Remote Viewing. Oh well, they can try it, it couldn't hurt!
If it's reflective, RADAR will work. Have they determined a distance for it?
However, if something was already loose, a thruster firing would cause the Shuttle to float away from it. Hopefully it was something small and in the bay. Something from the outside of the Shuttle would be bad news.
On the plus side, they can probably do a couple of small burns to get themselves closer to this thing, if necessary.
"The gravitational effects ...."
Good observation.
that s true, and I am
I don't know if they want to use up fuel chasing the thing down, especially if it's in a lower orbit. OTOH, it can't be too far below, since it's matching speed. Considerably lower, and it would be moving at a higher rate of speed.
They got EMP from that one. It was something like 100,000 amps at twenty million volts. The lightning suppression system worked, but this one was ten times what they had ever seen down there.
The Ku-band antenna used for TV transmissions is also the Rendezvous Radar. Right now it's a tradeoff between what's the most valuable information.
I'd guess that they'll eventually be using it in radar mode to see if they can work anything out about the thing and its orbit. After that, they can backtrack to find a common point ... such as, the point at which the Shuttle did its small burn.
It's Al Gore's "Social Security lock box."
Holy heck.
"Screw those commie bastards, and screw their little wussy space station."
Until they figure out if it came from the shuttle, which is likely, they would be in fuel conservation mode. They have to maintain attitude and continuously reposition the shuttle if they were to be required to stay in orbit for a extended period of time.
Right now, they are beginning the survey of the bay. I suspect they will also do a EVA tomorrow and reinspect the entire shuttle.
If they find a serious problem, they would have to re-dock with the station at some point.
I hope it is just a protective blanket from the bay.
a FOX reporter asked if was a satellite - they acknowledge there is no way to tell exactly how big it is from the video we are seeing on TV.
They're pretty much co-orbital, so it wouldn't take much propellant to get close, and they typically carry a large margin for rendezvous missions. They had no rendezvous difficulty, so they've got propellant to spare. The excess would therefore be burned off as a "wasting" component of the deorbit burn. So they could potentially use it for other things.
Whether or not they actually do try to get close will depend on a number of factors.
I mean... once when I was a kid we went out on a friend's cabin cruiser. We had pulled up next to an offshore platform to crab, and while we were there the tide went out and our boat lowered itself onto a bolt sticking out from a piling and we were stuck. I was all like "are we going to sink?" Well, we didn't sink, but it was kind of an emergency. My point is, it sounds like everybody is ok for now, they have contingency plans they didn't have 4 years ago, and everything is going to be allright.
That would certainly contradict reports that it was something that hit the shuttle and/or something that came out of the cargo bay. With all that has to go perfectly, something like this is quite worrisome.
The new pluto?
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