Assuming they cannot regain contact (and, i guess, control) of mir, how feasible is it that they could actually get something up there and be able to dock?
How unstable would it need to be before docking became impossible?
And assuming it cannot be guided down safely, anyone have any idea how much of it would survive re-entery, and how likely it is that it would hit a populated land mass?
I didn’t know they lost control, but even w/ a planned re-entery a sizable portion would survive. As for the chance it would hit land, roughly 3/4 of the earth is water so apx 1/4 chance of hitting land, what % of land is populates?.
If you know the orbit, you can tell what % of the time it is over land and change the 1/4 figure to that.
Is this serious? Have you got a link?
Or are you speaking hypothetically?
Mission Control regained contact after a blackout which lasted several hours:
http://www.cnn.com/2000/TECH/space/12/26/mir.contact.04/index.html
It was true, but according to this CNN article they have reestablished contact with Mir.
It wouldn’t have been very serious anyway since there’s nobody on the station right now. The biggest danger is that if they lost control of the station, they will have no way to steer it when it falls back to Earth some time in the next few years. If they manage to keep contact with the station, they will deliberately slow it down and make it fall above an uninhabited region (i.e. ocean).
Sky & Telescope said there was a 1-in-1000 chance for a human fatality from an uncontrolled reentry of the Compton satellite (which was why it was brought down in a controlled manner)
http://www.skypub.com/news/000407.html
(scroll down toward the bottom of this link)
Pardon me for being uninformed, but I wonder why some still usable pieces of Mir can’t be transferred to the new space station, which is costing everyone millions.
Russian technology is in it, so would it not be a good idea, with so much Russian material already up there in the form of Mir, to remove functional pods and things like the escape capsule and transfer them to the station? It seems like a great waste to just dump Mir into an ocean when it still is functional.
Couldn’t they like move Mir into a higher orbit and even closer to the new station?
I must admit, that I’m impressed with Mir because the thing was a fantastic educational tool to teach astronauts how to survive disasters in space, cobble things together and what over work can do to a crew. Some of the design flaws, like power cables running through open pressure hatches, probably taught all of the new station designers what not to do.
At the cost these days of anything used in space, I’d think they would salvage anything usable from Mir, like solar panels, for use in the new station. Heck, Mir itself, tethered to the station, could be a valuable emergency shelter in the event of some problem, a source of storage, an already constructed additional set of rooms and it still has it’s own power supply.
It seems a waste to dump it when most of it still works.
The technology of Mir and of the ISS are completely incompatible with each other. It would cost less to make and send up something new than to try and jury-rig something that might work at less efficiency and lower relibility.
Given money and a concerted effort by the Russians, yes, Mir can continue. But they have neither.
But that’s the problem. Many things on Mir do not work, they are completely incompatible technology, and they are old. Possibly, the only thing that could realistically be salvaged would be fuel and oxygen tanks - and even these would need a special effort to retrieve them, special adapters, etc. While these things sound easy here on Earth, they are very difficult to do in space.
Just tying in extra solar panels is not easy. The ISS is designed very specifically for a certain exact geometry and mass of solar panel. Just adding some panels on could easily throw off the stability of the station. Plus, there simply may not be anyplace to attach them. Plus, the voltage could be all wrong, and thus you will need to wire it in specially to the station circuits. Etc.
I imagine that MIR is quite fatigued. Every orbit it is exposed to the sun, then darkness. I would imagine that it suffers the same type of fatigue that airplanes suffer from. Plus the electronics are ancient by western standards. Plus time in space is expensive. It probably costs more to send a mission to salvage parts then to send new parts. Plus you dont know if the parts will still work. Have the rated hours of use expired?
Are you willing to risk the astronauts lives to save bucks? Congress did this with the Space Shuttle and a crew was lost due to budget cutbacks. (Its cheaper not to put in saftey features.)
Mir is scheduled to drop into the Pacific ocean sometime next year in February. The Russsians have decided to abandon Mir and focus their attention on the International Space Station. It is very expensive to maintain a space station. Not only do you have to perform routine maintenance, you also need pay a large number of ground crew to support it. That is why Mir will not be tethered to the new ISS. Mir is also very old, which means most of its parts are more or less obsolete in respect to the new ISS. Add to the fact that the seamingly simple act of transferring parts between the two stations is actually very complicated and costly, it is highly unlikely that and salvage missions will be deployed. Overall, Mir has served its purpose, and its time is due. It has to be crashed in a controlled manner before we lose all contact with it and it falls down to Earth crushing some old lady walking her dog in her back yard.
Why can’t they just use the rest of it’s energy to sent it hurtling toward the sun?
Mir doesn’t have enough eneregy to really go anywhere but down. You’d have to launch another mission to attach a big rocket to it before it could start heading towards the Sun at a reasonable pace. It’s much easier to just crash it somewhere in the Pacific. Mir’s isn’t exactly in a stable orbit around Earth. Its orbit tens to decay and bring it down if we didn’t keep boosting it up periodically. In order to bring it down, all we really have to do is shut off those boosters at the right time.
Plus I recently read that Mir has developed a nasty case of fungus. Apparently, lifting infrequently-used access panels inside the station often reveals a nasty surprise. Air quality in the station is poor as a result.
I don’t think they want to add another problem to the ISS by having people track fungal spores in from a latched-on Mir.
What you are proposing is making an interplanetary spacecraft out of a space station. It takes an enormous amount of energy to boost the station away from the earth - it needs to attain escape velocity, which is 11 km/sec. Currently it’s orbiting the earth at about 7 km/sec, so you need to increase the speed by 4 km/sec - the amount of fuel required to do this would weigh as much as the space station itself. It’d cost billions of dollars to launch that much fuel into space.
And that’s just for throwoing the space station away from the earth. For it to drop into the sun, it needs to get rid of the orbital speed of the earth around the sun. That’s another 30 km/s. Why waste that much energy on a useless space station? There’s a lot of good science to be done if we could send even a small probe there. NASA is thinking about sending a small probe to go near the sun but even that is currently too expensive.