ISS 'nauts told to duck and cover after dead Russian sat sprays space junk

Astronauts on the International Space Station were told to duck and cover on Thursday after a Russian satellite broke up. US Space Command warned of the sat's demise and identified it as RESURS-P1 (#39186) – a decommissioned Russian-owned satellite. Launched in 2013, RESURS-P1 was an Earth observation sat that the Mission …

[Eclectic Man]

"a debris-generating event in Low Earth Orbit."

How did that happen? I thought that satellites did not just disintegrate by their own accord, but needed some impetus like a collision with a large-ish mass or being 'shot down' deliberately.

[Terje]

Re: "a debris-generating event in Low Earth Orbit."

From what I can come up with, either uncontrollable spin or some part of it orbit is starting to dip far enough into the atmosphere for that to break up solar panels. or a combination of the two.

[Persona]

Re: "a debris-generating event in Low Earth Orbit."

Or that there is a lot of space junk in LEO and some piece of it hit this satellite hard.

[0laf]

Re: "a debris-generating event in Low Earth Orbit."

A mini-Kessler event

[Paul Crawford]

Re: "a debris-generating event in Low Earth Orbit."

Stored energy.

Sometimes a fault results in a battery over-charging and exploding, or similar for any left over propellant in attitude thrusters. If a satellite is fully functional at the time it is deemed end-of-life then you can usually vent all fuel and disconnect batteries, etc, but things don't always go to plan, and faults might just cause batteries to fail anyway.

Nothing specific to Russia here, the American NOAA-16 weather satellite has a similar fate (fault/end of life, some time later broke up).

[Terje]

Re: "a debris-generating event in Low Earth Orbit."

Sounds plausible, I didn't think of internal destructive events like that.

[Eclectic Man]

Re: "a debris-generating event in Low Earth Orbit."

Thanks, I had not thought of either of those possibilities. Of course, if a battery self-immolated and ignited unspent, and unvented fuel, that could be fairly destructive.

[Jellied Eel]

Re: "a debris-generating event in Low Earth Orbit."

Stored energy.

I found this video interesting.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NOGgw5fUgro

NASA launched a test vehicle from the Shuttle that was basically a frame covered in panels with different materials and components. 10yrs later, the Shuttle recovered it to study the effects of long-term exposure to space. It was interesting to see the way different materials deteriorated. Same thing would be happening to other satellites, so potential for things like thermal protection to degrade, internal components then overheating and maybe exploding, or just deteriorating to failure point.

[Doctor Syntax]

Re: "a debris-generating event in Low Earth Orbit."

Collision with an existing piece of junk?

[Irongut]

Worrying for poor Butch and Suni considering the only escape capsule available to them. (Starliner)

[John Robson]

The return isn't an issue, but they need to stay there to be able to investigate the issues that have been seen - because their issues are in the service module, which is detached soon after the deorbit burn and then is destroyed in the upper atmosphere.

[Anonymous Coward]

"What are ya, crazy? The capsule will probably kill ya!"

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds like a job for MEGA MAiD!

[Anonymous Coward]

"...has happened before after..."

Hat tip to the Reg editorial staff for the subheadline. It made sense in context, but I doubt that sequence of worlds has ever been used before (at least not with any success). You could teach a masterclass in tricky English verb tenses. Did Dr. Dan Streetmentioner join the staff recently?

[sitta_europea]

On a point of order, using the term "floating" in reference to "space junk" is likely to give the wrong impression.

A more appropriate word for something closing on your location at, say, ten miles per second might be "hurtling".

[ITMA]

You mean the space debris/junk was "floating" in the same way that 650 tonne train bearing down on you at 140mph is "trundling along".

[David Hicklin]

strictly speaking everything in orbit is "falling" all the time, its just that they miss the planet all the time...

[ITMA]

Floating and falling are not exactly the same - unless you class falling as "floating at speed in one direction"