International Space Station | Digital Crosstalk

Talkback

Brian and team, who work for a digital marketing agency run this Digital Crosstalk blog.
Occasionally we might blog about companies and people we work with but for the most part we'll simply be blogging about stories and events which we find interesting.

Comments Read

4th
AUG

Astronaut’s $100k tool-kit returns to earth

Posted by Brian | Filed under blogging

: Image by chatarra picks via Flickr

If while gazing up at the stars on Monday night, you happened across a shooting star then there is a small possibility what you were watching wasn’t a comet or a piece of space debris from the International Space Station.

No, it wasn’t the advance guard of an HG Wells martian invasion either…

What you could have been watching was the destruction of an astronaut’s $100,000 toolkit. Specifically one which was lost during a spacewalk at the ISS on November 18 last year and now, having circled the earth in an ever-decreasing orbit finally has made it’s re-entry into the atmosphere where it promptly burned up.

The toolbag, which weighed around 30lbs (14 kg) was roughly the size and shape of a small backpack and would have contained grease guns, rubbish bags and a scraper tool said NASA officials. It was lost during the spacewalk to repair a worn solar array joint on the ISS by former NASA astronaut Heidemarie Stefanyshyn-Piper.

According to NASA a grease gun had leaked inside the toolbag and as Stefanyshyn-Piper tried to clear up the mess, the bag drifted free as it hadn’t been properly secured.

“There was that split second thinking that, maybe I can go jump for it and grab it. Then I realized that it would just make everything worse and then we’d have two floating objects, one of which would be me,” Stefanyshyn-Piper said in a televised Nov. 19 interview from space the day after losing the bag. “So the best thing to do was just to let it go.”

One wonders what would have happened if it had been her hand-bag that she had dropped?