These heaps of old batteries, weighing 2.9 tons and 4.8 miles per second, are now the heaviest piece of garbage discharged from the International Space Station.
The palette is full of nickel-hydrogen batteries, and it will remain in a low orbit for the next two to four years, before burning harmlessly into the atmosphere, according to a NASA statement. SpaceFlightNow reports that the pallet is the “most massive object ever transported from the outpost.”
NASA spokeswoman Leah Cheshier confirmed this.
“The external pallet was the largest object – massive – that has ever come under scrutiny with 2.9 tons from the International Space Station, more than twice the mass of the tank of the Early Ammonia Servicing System used by the space walker Clay Anderson. was dropped during the STS-118 mission in 2007, ”Cheshier wrote in an email.
NASA’s ballistics officials indicate that there is no threat of the palette smashing into other space objects, but ‘this article will, like everyone else, be tracked down by the US Space Command’, she added.
G / O Media can get a commission
It was not the original plan to throw the pallet away like that. The failed launch of a Soyuz rocket in 2018, in which NASA astronaut Nick Hague and Roscosmos cosmonaut Alexey Ovchinin were forced to land in the Kazakh steppes, disrupted the space schedule, leading to the remaining palette.
NASA’s spacewalk on February 1, 2021, involving astronauts Mike Hopkins and Victor Glover, was remarkable in that it made a four-year effort to upgrade the space station’s batteries. These batteries store energy collected by solar power, 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 replacing them began in 2016.
This effort required four supply missions of the Japanese H-II Transfer Vehicle (HTV) cargo spacecraft, 13 different astronauts and 14 astronauts, in which 48 nickel-hydrogen batteries were replaced by 24 lithium-ion batteries.
Normally, the old batteries would be placed in an HTV and flown off the ISS, and the items would usually burn up when they re-enter. But the Soyuz failure disrupted the pattern of spacewalks and the proposed schedule to such an extent that an HTV cargo ship left the station without a battery pallet at the end of 2018, according to SpaceFlightNow. The battery replacement mission continued and HTVs left the station with pallets, but now with an extra one that was always attached to the station. With the mission and no more HTVs (at least not one of the old design – they are being replaced by the HTV-X cargo spacecraft), the mission planners had to dispatch the pallet on their own.
So this is what they did on Thursday, March 11, when mission commanders in Houston used the Canadarm2 robot arm to “release an external pallet of old nickel-hydrogen batteries into the earth.” according to to NASA. The object was released about 427 km above the earth’s surface.
‘In the past it was not a big deal to throw things off the ISS because there were very few satellites was under [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 cube sets and with recently introduced Starlinks while raising a track. So I’m worried. ”
To which he added: “I do not immediately see what they could still do, except to fly a whole extra HTV mission just to get rid of it. ”
According to the European Space Agency, around 34,000 objects larger than 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, gradually increases, which raises the concern of potential collisions and even more track residues.
This post was updated to comment by Jonathan McDowell.