Astronauts drop tool bag into orbit that you can see with binoculars
usatoday.com
usatoday.com
If anything, you'd usually expect a negative association between excellence in one area and excellence in another area: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkson%27s_paradox
Although it's kind of strange to see that type of writing in USA Today... I thought I was reading Jalopnik or something.
[0] https://www.businessinsider.com/nasa-astronauts-lost-items-i...
Their plan included forming a grunge band, which they called "Frog the Dry Widget" (a play on Toad the Wet Sproket).
> 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.
Bad news: You are condemned to die alone in space.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1vXdRUIZ_EM
whoops
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.
I'm not suggesting that it's similar in any way to losing a toolbox. Lisa's entire situation was clearly something very different, you're right about that, but an emotional breakdown (while not a precise medical term) is typically used to describe an episode or outburst caused by too much stress/pressure. It's strange to see it used for a series of premeditated crimes that took months, involved lots of planning, careful packing, and a journey of 900 miles by car to reach the victim.
Apparently, it basically happens every training and the divers take great joy in putting the items on the Lost Wall for everyone to see.
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?
And apparently there's nothing funnier than an embarrassed astronaut.
https://www.businessinsider.com/nasa-astronauts-lost-items-i...
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.)
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.
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.
ISS is in a rather low orbit, it requires quite a bit of upkeep (ha) to stay in space due to the tiny bit of atmospheric drag: https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/9482/how-long-woul...
That's true for everything else near that orbit, so the tool bag will probably burn up (well, re-enter anyway) in the atmosphere within a year or two, and be a complete non-issue after the next boost takes it to a permanently-different orbit.
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?
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.
>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."
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.
That's why the Canadarm handles inspection/gripping work. Much less risky to have a migrating robotic arm.
Could have left that in drafts
EDIT I mean are they trying to elicit responses like "more men in space" to prevent responses like "less space more healthcare"?
It'd be weird to start trying to cover that up just because people might make jokes some find distasteful.
> 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.
This doesn't read like that though
It reads like “looll some women did something incompetent! get a load of this guys”
I don't think the article was written that way, but I think that it's clear that's how many people would take it.
It'd have been nice if the article had listed multiple examples of things being lost during spacewalks and not just the other time a woman did it - assuming there are other previous examples anyway. Searching for that kind of information now is difficult since search engines just want to push whatever the latest story is. A google search for the word "astronauts" alone returns links to news articles about this incident.
Must be a Festool!
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...
If you want to build a single Lego, the tooling could cost you hundreds of thousand of dollars.
https://recursiverecipes.schollz.com/recipe/apple-pie?amount...
discussion of that site:
I had a tool kit in the Marines that was a basic split case with DeWalt looking hand tools and a soldering kit in it. The thing cost somewhere on the order of $60k and replacing individual parts was often more expensive than the sum of the collection. I constantly had to inventory the thing every time I took it out and I'd never let anyone use my tools or leave them laying around.
The reason is that military tools and parts are built according to a spec and often in batches. That spec has to be reaffirmed for every batch and is often specified within the item spec. There's pretty normal specs in there like size and thread count, but then there's other that require destructive testing like tensile strength, material composition, heat tolerance, etc... When you make a big order the price per unit is pretty cheap because one destroyed item per item in the collection is amortized across the rest of them. When you order a single one they make one plus one for each destructive test.
One of the most memorable examples I can think of is that I operated a special truck in Afghanistan that cost ~$1.5M. In order to build and deploy that one truck they built 4 more including all internals and hit it with rockets, explosives, and bullets to durability test the configuration of the internals. In the end, one $1.5M truck is actually $7.5M in order to ensure the safety of everyone inside.
166.667 $600 hammers.
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.
It is true that litter in very low orbits is oversensationalized, though.
> 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.
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.
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...