ISS discards 2.9 tons of battery, so the most massive space trash

KOMPAS.com – International Space Station (ISS) is known to have discarded battery weighing 2.9 tonnes to Earth’s orbit.

Battery The nickel-hydrogen placed on a pallet is traveling at a speed of 7.7 kilometers per second and now stands up to the title of the heaviest waste dumped from the ISS.

As quoted from Gizmodo, Tuesday (16/3/2021) in a statement, NASA said the battery would remain in low Earth orbit for the next two to four years before finally burning harmlessly in atmosphere.

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“The battery is the largest object ever removed from the ISS, more than twice the mass of the Early Ammonia Servicing System tank Clay Anderson dumped during the STS-118 mission in 2007,” said NASA spokesman Leah Cheshier.

NASA said there was no threat if the pallet would hit another space object. Even so, this battery will still be supervised by the US Space Command.

Actually throwing out the battery is not the original plan. It all started when in 2011 NASA decided to switch from nickel-hydrogen to lithium-ion batteries.

Production of lithium-ion batteries itself began in 2014 and the replacement process began in 2016.

To replace it will need 14 space trips, in which 48 nickel-hydrogen batteries will be replaced with 24 lithium-ion batteries.

Usually the old batteries will be placed in the HTV cargo and dumped from the ISS, then most of the goods will catch fire on re-entry (enter the atmosphere).

However, due to the failure of the Soyuz launch which resulted in disruption of space travel patterns, an HTV cargo left the ISS without carrying a nickel-hydrogen battery.

Inevitably, a mission must be undertaken to dispose of these pallets.

The battery pallets were then discarded on Thursday (11/3/2021). Mission controllers in Houston used the Canadarm2 robotic arm to discharge an external pallet filled with old nickel-hydrogen batteries into Earth orbit.

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The object was released about 427 km above the Earth’s surface.

“It used to be that removing stuff from the ISS was not a big problem, because there were very few satellites under it (at an altitude below 400km). But now it’s different so I have concerns,” said Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist at Harvard-Smithsonian for Astrophysics.

According to the European Space Agency, around 34,000 objects over 10 cm in size are currently in orbit around Earth.

These objects consist of spaceship equipment and pieces.

With the increasing volume of objects in space, both functioning and not, has raised concerns about potential collisions and more orbital debris.

Also read: Scientists Discover Space Storms Raining Earth with Electrons, What Is It?

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