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NASA astronauts Yasmine Moghbeli and Loral O’Hara made their first spacewalk this month with an equipment bag floating in space.
The duo completed maintenance work outside the International Space Station (ISS) in six hours and 42 minutes, according to the space agency.
The November 1 spacewalk saw Moghbeli and O’Hara complete work on the station’s solar panels, which track the sun, but they didn’t have enough time to remove and stow the communications electronics box. The duo abandoned this mission for future space travel, and instead conducted an evaluation of how the mission could be achieved.
During their hours-long mission, a bag of equipment was discovered and “lost” by flight controllers using the International Space Station’s external camera, NASA said. Luckily, no equipment was needed for the remainder of their mission.
NASA said in a statement: “Mission Control analyzed the bag’s path and concluded that the risk of reconnecting with the station was low and that the crew on board and the space station were safe with no action required.” Official blog.
According to EarthSky, a website that tracks cosmic events, the equipment bag is currently orbiting Earth ahead of the International Space Station, and will likely be visible. From Earth with a pair of telescopes over the next few months until it disintegrates in our planet’s atmosphere.
This is not the first time an astronaut has lost his equipment in space. In 2008, Heidi Stefanyshyn’s Piper bag went flying while she was cleaning and lubricating the gears on a broken swivel joint. A spacewalk in 2006 saw astronauts Pierce Sellers and Michael Fossum lose a 14-inch spoon while testing a way to repair the space shuttle.
Space debris, like these objects, is artificial material that orbits the Earth but no longer functions. It can be anything from small chips of paint to parts discarded during a rocket launch.
In September 2023, European Space Agency An estimated 35,290 objects have been tracked and cataloged by Various space observation networks, where the total mass of objects orbiting the Earth reaches more than 11 thousand tons.
2023-11-13 14:43:24
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