On Wednesday, the Virtual Telescope Project (VTP) captured grainy footage of the errant toolkit, which can be spotted with binoculars.
Courtesy of NASA/JSCEven the best and brightest can drop the ball sometimes—or in this case, a tool bag.
NASA astronauts Jasmin Moghbeli and Loral O’Hara were performing maintenance work outside the International Space Station earlier this month when they lost their grip on a bag of tools, Elizabeth Howell reported for Space.com. Meganne Christian, reserve astronaut with the European Space Agency, posted a short video clip of the moment the equipment drifted away. It was seen floating over Mount Fuji around Nov. 5.
On Wednesday, the Virtual Telescope Project (VTP) captured grainy footage of the errant toolkit, which can be spotted with binoculars. "The object looks like a sharp dot of light in the center, as the telescope tracked it, so stars left long trails on the background," VTP founder Gianluca Masi wrote on his site.
Advertisement
Article continues below this ad
O'Hara and Moghbeli completed the spacewalk without further incident, and experts determined the trajectory of the bag was not a threat to the space station or its onboard crew, officials wrote on the NASA site. It was even given its own tracking ID, 58229/1998-067WC, in the U.S. system for cataloging artificial objects in orbit, tweeted Jonathan McDowell, a scientist with the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.
Per Space.com, the bag will continue its orbit for a few months before it burns up upon re-entering Earth's atmosphere at an altitude of about 70 miles. As of last week, it was roughly 250 miles above the earth's surface. It's estimated that it will disintegrate in a fiery descent sometime between March and July 2024, Eddie Irizarry and Deborah Byrd reported for EarthSky. For now, curious spectators can direct their binoculars skyward and try to spot the stray tool bag if they're along the same path as the International Space Station. Projections place it about 5-10 minutes ahead of the station.
According to Forbes' Mary Whitfill Roeloffs, this is hardly the first time spacewalkers have contributed to the growing collection of space junk. It's not even the first tool bag. In 2008, a $100,000 toolkit was lost in space, and just two years earlier, astronaut Piers Sellers lost a spatula while testing a heat-shield material on a spacecraft. "That was my favorite spatch … don't tell the other spatulas," he reportedly joked. Most recently, the Washington Post's Amy Wang reported that a cloth shield, described as a key piece of the International Space Station, was lost during a spacewalk in 2017.
Advertisement
Article continues below this ad
Science - Latest - Google News
November 19, 2023 at 03:15AM
https://ift.tt/PJc1eyN
NASA lost a tool bag in space. Now you can see it with binoculars. - Chron
Science - Latest - Google News
https://ift.tt/2MAWpRT
https://ift.tt/kRPAKgr
Bagikan Berita Ini
0 Response to "NASA lost a tool bag in space. Now you can see it with binoculars. - Chron"
Post a Comment