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“The uncontrolled disposal of the pallet, however, was not part of the original plan. It was made necessary by a disrupted spacewalking schedule following the f
by krallja 3y ago
“The uncontrolled disposal of the pallet, however, was not part of the original plan. It was made necessary by a disrupted spacewalking schedule following the failed launch of a Soyuz rocket in 2018, which forced NASA astronaut Nick Hague and Roscosmos cosmonaut Alexey Ovchinin to make an emergency landing in the Kazakh steppe. This event led to a backlog in the disposal of such equipment. Normally, old batteries would be placed inside an HTV and jettisoned from the ISS to burn up on re-entry.”
https://gizmodo.com/massive-iss-cargo-pallet-reentry-earth-march-2024-1851317508 https://gizmodo.com/massive-iss-cargo-pallet-reentry-earth-m...
- jauntywundrkind 3y agoWould that be different? Is there any benefit to burning up the batteries in a HTV vs letting them drop?
- geerlingguy 3y agoControl - the HTV is automated to descend with a preset profile, so it would not just come down at random after a bunch of orbits.
- dotancohen 3y agoThe current tragedy has the batteries just minutes away from hitting London or Berlin. A controlled reentry would be much further from large population centres.
- sokoloff 3y agoIs the current event a tragedy? It seems maybe a tragedy in the literary genre sense of the word more than in the disastrous event sense of the word.
- dotancohen 3y agoThat's what I get for typing on a phone with autocorrect. The word should have been "trajectory" though I concede that I may have spelled that incorrectly enough for the autocorrect to mistake the word.