Weighing 2.9 tons and traveling 4.8 miles per second, this pile of old batteries is now the heaviest piece of garbage that has been dumped from the International Space Station.
The pallet is packed with nickel-hydrogen batteries and will remain in low Earth orbit for the next two to four years “before burning harmlessly in the atmosphere,” according to a NASA statement. SpaceFlightNow rEPORTS that the pallet is “the most massive object ever thrown from the outpost into orbit.”
NASA spokeswoman Leah Cheshier confirmed this.
“The outer pallet was the largest object – in terms of mass – ever thrown from the International Space Station at 2.9 tons, more than twice the mass of the Early Ammonia Servicing System tank thrown by Spacewalker Clay Anderson during the STS mission -118 from 2007, ”Cheshier wrote in an email.
NASA ballistic officers “do not indicate any threat” that the spacecraft will break into other space objects, but “this object, like all, will be pursued by the US Space Command,” she added.
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It was not the original plan for the pallet to be thrown away. failed launch 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, caused an interruption of the space travel program, leading to the remaining pallet.
NASA’s spacewalk on February 1, 2021, involving astronauts Mike Hopkins and Victor Glover, was notable by completing a four-year effort to modernize the space station’s batteries. These batteries store the energy collected by solar networks, 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 them began in 2016.
This effort required four supply missions from the Japanese spacecraft H-II Transfer Vehicle (HTV), 13 different astronauts and 14 spacewalkers, in which 48 nickel-hydrogen batteries were replaced with 24 lithium-ion batteries.
Normally, old batteries would be placed inside an HTV and discarded from the ISS, and items would burn mostly on re-entry. But the failure of the Soyuz launch disrupted the spacewalk model and the planned program so that at the end of 2018, an HTV freight carrier left the station without a battery pallet, according to SpaceFlightNow. The battery replacement mission continued and the HTVs continued to leave the pallet station, but now with an additional one permanently attached to the station. With the mission done and no more HTVs coming (at least none of the old design – they are being replaced by the HTV-X spacecraft), the mission planners had to give up the pallet on their own.
So they did this on Thursday, March 11, when Houston mission controllers used the Canadarm2 robot arm to “release an external pallet loaded with old nickel-hydrogen batteries into Earth’s orbit.” right NASA. The object was released about 427 km above the Earth’s surface.
“It used to be that it wasn’t a big deal to throw things from the ISS, because very few satellites they were under it [at altitudes below 250 miles (400 km)], Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics explained in an email. “This is no longer so true, with a bunch of cubesats and Starlinks recently launched during orbit. So I have concerns. ”
To which he added: “I don’t immediately see what else he could have done other than fly an extra HTV the only mission to get rid of it. ”
According to the European Space Agency, around 34,000 objects larger than 3 cm (10 cm) are currently in orbit around 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 concerns of potential collisions and even more orbital debris.
This post has been updated to include comments made by Jonathan McDowell.