A lot of people sent me notes via email and Twitter saying they were out watching the Shuttle and the ISS pass by in the sky last night when Discovery did something very odd and disturbing: there was a flash and then an expanding halo of light around the Shuttle.
My first thought when I read this was that it was an orbital maneuver — a rocket firing — or maybe a meteor coincidentally near the same spot in the sky, but it turns out to be neither: it was a waste liquid dump, when the astronauts empty waste tanks before landing the Orbiter. SpaceWeather.com has the details, including a very cool picture.
I was out last night twice to see Discovery and the ISS, but didn’t see the Orbiter either time (I think the predictions I was using were off due to the imminent landing), so I missed the show. Oh well. I imagine more pictures will turn up pretty soon, though, so keep your eyes open.
Discovery has a landing opportunity at 19:05 Eastern time (23:05 GMT) today — they’ll make the de-orbit burn at 17:59 if the weather holds up — and then another opportunity about 90 minutes later at 20:42 (00:42 GMT) if needed. As usual, I’ll be tweeting it as it happens.
September 10th, 2009 at 1:38 pm
Must contain snarky comment
September 10th, 2009 at 1:46 pm
Ewww. Imagine the irony of losing a 100 M$ satellite to an impact by a frozen block of astronaut urine.
An interesting question is how long a block of ice/urine will survive in the vacuum of space before it sublimates (ignoring that its orbit will decay rapidly from the ISS altitude)?
September 10th, 2009 at 1:51 pm
Weather is looking like a big factor today and may likely delay the landing.
BTW, have you seen that Japan launched its first cargo ship to the ISS today? It’s the country’s first spacecraft to the station. What’s awesome is a) It launched on a new rocket as well, b) it will test out techniques for docking to the station that will be used later by SpaceX and Orbital Sciences capsules, and c) is larger enough to carry racks of experiments to the station, which the Progress and Soyuz are not.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/11/science/space/11shuttle.html?_r=1&hp
September 10th, 2009 at 1:57 pm
it was a waste liquid dump, when the astronauts empty waste tanks before landing the Orbiter.
Reminds me of the scene near the end of the movie Spaced Invaders, when the Martians need to lighten the ship to escape Earth’s gravity.
Any reports of extremely large beans growing anywhere?
J/P=?
September 10th, 2009 at 2:00 pm
My 10-year-old daughter’s homework assignment yesterday was to go out and watch. Being twilight, the sky was black, and the ISS was brighter than Jupiter, as it was still in sunlight.
I only wish I had found my binoculars in time, so we could see more than just a bright dot.
Oh, and according to NASA, it was at 70 degrees elevation here, making for great visibility.
http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/realdata/sightings/cities/skywatch.cgi?country=United+States
September 10th, 2009 at 2:15 pm
Just saw the ISS pass overhead 10 minutes ago (made me want to check out this blog, in fact). Wonderful sight. Didn’t see the shuttle, though. Didn’t know where to look to be honest, and apparently no liquid waste dumps tonight…
September 10th, 2009 at 2:20 pm
Two nights ago I could clearly see the ISS and the shuttle passing separately.
Last night there was only a single light, but wow, did it ever glow. As I noted in one of the other articles last night, it flared to a -10 easily. Much brighter than the -8 Iridium flares I saw earlier in the summer. The ISS appeared, flared for about 10 seconds, then resumed at the -3.4 that heavens above projected across the sky.
Didn’t see a comet-like trail though.
Was that the waste dump? I don’t know where the shuttle was relative to the position of the ISS at that time.
September 10th, 2009 at 2:28 pm
taking a leak… IN SPAAAAAAACE…
September 10th, 2009 at 2:44 pm
Surely, someone could work the planet Uranus in here, too.
Don’t call me Shirley!
September 10th, 2009 at 2:49 pm
I got a few exposures of the shuttle/ISS over Georgia Sunday evening. Find them here;
http://community.statesboroherald.com/gallery/detail/2623/
September 10th, 2009 at 3:01 pm
Is that an ion drive with pee as the reaction mass?
September 10th, 2009 at 4:12 pm
I printed off the ISS times for the whole year from the Heavens Above website back in April. The ISS hasn’t been visible in my area since July, but now I have noticed that the printed times are wrong – about 15 minutes too early. I’ve also noticed that the Celestia program is showing the ISS in the wrong place. Has it altered its orbit recently or something?
September 10th, 2009 at 4:23 pm
Of course the ISS is really the Prototype International Space Station, but ‘ISS’ is shorter and duller.
Of course it could also be a conspiracy to knock out the solar panels on lower orbiting satellites.
September 10th, 2009 at 4:59 pm
Too cool picture – even cooler is the fact that I know the guy that took the picture! I’ll need to contact him. Thanks to the RASC I’ve had a few opportunities to meet Clair…
September 10th, 2009 at 5:29 pm
I actually did email Mr. Plait about this this morning because I was one of the lucky people to see the dump EXACTLY when it happened. I had no clue what I was witnessing last night and did not even know where to begin to start researching. Not knowing about the water dump (hadn’t really thought of it before but it makes sense), I actually for a brief moment thought the shuttle blew up or was hit or something serious along those lines because honestly, that is exactly what it looked like. I can only guess that it is rather rare to see such an amazing event because of so many factors just to see the shuttle in transit in the first place, so I must say, it jumped to the top of my “holy cow I can’t believe I am witnessing this!!!” list.
I only wish I had my camera with me!
September 10th, 2009 at 6:45 pm
I’m not sure I understand: surely the waste liquid dump has happened on every shuttle flight? Is it just rare for it to happen at night during a visible transit, hence the novelty?
September 10th, 2009 at 6:59 pm
@Ellwood: I use heavens-above sometimes, but have found that the satellite tracker on spaceweather.com to be dead on time-wise over the past week or so.
September 10th, 2009 at 10:06 pm
I saw the “comet” last night here over Rand McNally! And the time on heavens-above was as accurate as ever.
September 10th, 2009 at 10:16 pm
“constellation urion” – Wally Schirra, Gemini VI
Thanks for the memory, Phil…
RIP Wally!
September 10th, 2009 at 11:23 pm
I saw it as well from Northern Michigan. It looked a lot like a comet tail following the shuttle. It was unnerving at first because I’ve watched the shuttle/station for a long time and I’d never seen any thing other than a bright dot. I feared the worse so I ran to my computer and pulled up nasa.tv to see they were conducting a operation. I didn’t find out until later it was urine. Nasa, you can dump your piss over the great lakes any time if it’s going to be that pretty.
September 11th, 2009 at 12:34 am
@ 19. Rob in PA Says:
“constellation urion” – Wally Schirra, Gemini VI
Thanks for the memory, Phil… RIP Wally!
Quoted in Apollo 13 too if I recall right.
Btw. BA did you ever do a review of theApollo 13 movie? If not it’ still be a good one to do. The 40th anniversary of that is next year too.
September 11th, 2009 at 5:16 am
Eddie: The Heavens Above website is correct now, but I printed off the times for the whole year back in April, and now we’re in September my printed list is wrong. So my point is that the times have changed (so does that mean Bob Dylan was right?)
Elwood (one ‘l’)
September 11th, 2009 at 9:38 am
Elwood: ISS does regular maneuvers and boosts, it is not surprising that an April list is wrong. In fact, due to the unpredictability of atmospheric drag, I would expect a list to stop being particularly good after a month or two.
September 11th, 2009 at 9:40 am
I’m trying to understand the details I’m seeing in the comet-like picture. I assume the brighter trail is ISS. The tail-like cloud is the shuttle – but where is its trail? I think I see a very dim one along the main tail, but it is a lot dimmer than I would expect. And why the double tails?
September 11th, 2009 at 12:13 pm
@Elwood; Sorry, Elwood. One ‘l”. Duly noted.
September 11th, 2009 at 12:40 pm
The shuttle did a slight debris avoidance maneuver yesterday morning, which changed the planned landing times by a few minutes. This would have made the times of any visible passes change as well. I don’t know how often heavens above updates their predictions, but I would check again. Though it’s cloudy and about to rain here (New England) so I probably won’t have any chance to see it. NASA has said they’re planning to land tonight no matter what, either at Kennedy if the weather clears (unlikely) or at Edwards.
September 17th, 2009 at 6:51 am
I thought I had heard how they spent millions on a pee-recycling machine to make potable water out of their pee and reuse it so we didn’t have to spend more millions to lift extra water into orbit. If I’m wrong anf they didn’t, they should. I support space exploration, but everything NASA does costs more than it really should. It costs about $12 to buy or build a device to make potable water out of pee.
September 20th, 2009 at 8:34 pm
Hey thanks Rob, I’ve been trying to figure out the origin of “Constellation Urion” for years and years, I thought it dated back to Mercury. How did you know this was from Schirra? Yeah, in retrospect, it sounds like him.
October 5th, 2009 at 6:23 pm
My boss told me about witnessing this event, and was very unnerved because he SWORE it was an aircraft at about 8000 feet altitude, based upon its bright lights and flight path.
I calmly tried to explain to him that he probably saw the shuttle or the ISS, and the ‘cloud’ he saw was likely from some sort of retro-rocket firing or more likely a waste dump. I pointed out the the object likely stayed the same brightness as opposed to changing, say like an aircraft landing light would as the aircraft passed overhead. (He conceded that there were no blinking lights like a real aircraft would have before I even asked about them.) I suggested going to Heavens Above to see if they had a track archive of ISS orbits (I know they have a detail ‘upcoming’ schedule).
I also explained how many times I’ve seen the ISS (including with a shuttle and/or a Soyuz or Progress module nearby in the same orbit), how it’s not always going the same direction nor at the same apparent altitude, how sometimes it ‘disappears’ fairly suddenly as it passes into Earth’s shadow and so on. I had him mostly convinced that I knew what I was talking about, but he couldn’t unwrap his mind from the aircraft–or some craft in the atmosphere–idea. (He’s an aircraft enthusiast, among other hobbies, by the way, so I understand to some degree his bias, based upon his past experience.)
I wish I could have witnessed the event myself, as it’s one thing I’ve not yet seen in my sky observations. But I did encourage him (and my other co-workers who by this time had joined the conversation) to look stuff up, and more important, to look up. The night sky is amazing and mysterious, but often there is a lot there that we just miss because we’re not paying attention!
By the way, a week later, he told me that Saturday Night Live made a joke about the whole waste dump, complete with a photo, and he was happy to have had the mystery solved, even from as unofficial a source as that. Plus, he admitted that–gasp!–I had been RIGHT! (He’s cool that way, though, which is a good thing.)
November 7th, 2009 at 11:02 am
Sorry to break it to you, but the shuttle does not dump its liquid waste. It’s too dangerous (it could freeze and hit the shuttle, damaging the heat sheilds, and the shuttle would then blow up in re-entry). The shuttle just brings its waste back to earth where there are plenty of scientists eager to analyse it. The ISS does dump its waste, and this burns up in the atmosphere, so the next time you see a “shooting star” remember that.