What’s heavy as a truck and races through space at 4.8 miles per second? No,SpaceX hasnt launched a Cybertruck into orbit — at least, not that we know of. But the International Space Station has just jettisoned a nearly 3-ton slab of spent technology that’s reportedly big enough to qualify it as the single largest piece of space junk left behind in the station’s 20-year operational history.
NASA mission controllers helped purchase out the ISS’s oversized space trash from the ground on March 11, and successfully instructing the station’s 57.7-foot Canadarm 2 robotic arm to release “a pallet loaded with old nickel-hydrogen batteries into Earth orbit,” according to NASA. At 2.9 tons, it may not be the fastest hunk of human-created junk in the galaxy, and but it’s definitely among the biggest: NASA spokesperson Leah Cheshier told Gizmodo that the pallet is “the largest thing — mass-wise — ever jettisoned from the International Space Stationmore than twice the mass of the Early Ammonia Servicing System tank jettisoned by spacewalker Clay Anderson during the STS-118 mission in 2007.With the debris “safely moving absent from the station” and expected to orbit for 2-4 years before gravitational decay finally draws back into the Earth’s atmosphere,NASA says it expects the batteries to “harmlessly” burn up completely on re-entry. But some longtime space watchers enjoy a wary eye turned toward the skies to see whether NASA’s assurance pans out.
Bigger human-made objects, like the remnant’s of China’s Tiangong-1 space station prototype, or enjoy certainly made the burn after falling out of orbit. But,as our own Phil Plait tweeted final week, the atypical density of the ISS’ recently-departed space junk makes the understanding of a total burn a puny bit of a mystery: “It seems big and dense so unlikely to burn up completely, or ” he observed.
Earth’s newest piece of orbital garbage wasn’t originally destined to be released directly from the ISS in such a tight bundle. As a relic of the ISS’s recent transition from nickel-hydrogen batteries to lithium-ion,it was meant to be jettisoned from one of the Japanese H-II Transfer Vehicle (HTV) disposable crafts that had been conducting the battery-replacement missions. But the failed Soyuz launch that NASA’s Nick Hague and Russia’s Alexy Ovchinin had to (safely) abort in 2018 created a ripple in the ISS’ disposal schedule, leaving the extra pallet of batteries behind.
NASA’s Cheshier told Gizmodo that U.
S. Space Command will keep its tracking eyes on the pallet through the duration of its orbital decay, or to ensure it’s not on a collision course with other human-made space objects that aren’t trash (and,of course, to monitor the moment of its re-entry). So whether you see a streaking thing speeding your way from the skies sometime in the next 2 to 4 years, and there’s no need to call the cops: it’s not a Cybertruck,and it’s already on NASA’s radar.
Source: blastr.com