this post was submitted on 11 Nov 2023
185 points (98.4% liked)
Astronomy
3950 readers
1 users here now
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Joining stars, planets, nebulas, and galaxies as a target for skywatchers is now a surprisingly bright tool bag floating through the space around Earth.
The bag of tools gave NASA astronauts Jasmin Moghbeli and Loral O'Hara the slip on Nov. 2, 2023, as they were conducting a spacewalk outside of the International Space Station (ISS).
European Space Agency (ESA) reserve astronaut Meganne Christian shared footage of the moment the tool bag escaped the grasp of Moghbeli on her X account.
Also on X, Harvard Center for Astrophysics (CfA) astronomer Jonathan McDowell revealed that the bag is circling Earth in a roughly 258 by 258 mile (415 by 416 kilometer) orbit.
In 2008, as NASA astronaut Heide Stefanyshyn-Piper attempted to repair a jammed gear on an ISS solar panel, she lost her grip on another tool bag with then circled our planet.
Late NASA astronaut Piers Sellers lost his grip on the kitchen implement as he was using it to spread heat-shield repair slime during the space shuttle Discovery's flight STS-121 in 2006.
The original article contains 479 words, the summary contains 172 words. Saved 64%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
I find it oddly comforting that even for astronauts in space, many repairs still consist of smearing various types of schmoo on things.
The only person I know of who really uses the word schmoo is Linus. Are you Linus?
🧐
I think the two numbers are perigee and apogee distance. (Closest orbital point and furthest orbital point)
The joke is that the orbit was clearly originally reported in kilometers, but the article editor "helpfully" converted it to miles and reported it in miles as default, but it makes no sense now because the same "miles" number now equals two different "kilometers" numbers.
Hah I didn't notice
My only understanding is those two distances are the latitude/longitude and the height. Basically imagine it corkscrewing around the earth.
I think that means it's nearly geostationary but instead going in a 415ish km circle above the same spot on earth? Idk.
Geostationary orbit is at about 35k km, the ISS is at about 400 km, so its definitely not geostationary.
The ISS hauls ass across the sky, a full orbit about every hour and a half.