Opps. I bet the other Astronauts are busting her balls over that little mishap.

For some reason when I heard she was going to be the primary spacewalker on this one I had a bad feeling. Just something about women with two last names like this that just makes me think fail is coming.

Well, at least in space you don't have to worry about tools falling from above and hitting you in the head

Wonder how much NASA paid for the cresent wrenches in that tool bag.

You would think that nasa of all agencies would have implemented some redundancies in space walks. Like tethering the tool bag to the astronaut or space station or something. No?

Kind of embarrassing honestly, we can live in space, and are working on going to mars.

If it lands on my property I'm putting it on Ebay.

that was a damn stupid thing to do.

I thought astronauts were supposed to be smart

No idiot cords lanyards on those things?

Looks like she is opening a can of beans to go with my sammich.

Replay of her spacewalk on NASA TV right now.

http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/nasatv/

And didn't the last female to do a spacewalk throw her digital camera into orbit

...using duct tape and WD40.

As for the bag... Tim the 'Tool Man' Taylor has them!

I'm trying to decide if she's hot, or not.  Could just be a bad hair day.

It affects the form of punishment.

Exactlty.  We used them while working on a pier.

True, falling implies motion due to acceleration, towards the source of acceleration . . .  but in space, no one can hear you scream and there is no up.

I believe the Space Station's speed in orbit is about 18000 miles per hour. The Astronautess accelerated the tool bag away from the space station. How would you like to run smack dab into that stupid tool bag at that speed? It could put a nice hole in the tin can or give a space walker a really bad headache.

At the very least it appears to be thrown towards the Earth. Hopefully it will come dangerously close to the next manned ChiCom capsule. The bastards deserve it after firing junk towards the ISS.

Know much about orbital mechanics?

It'll come back.   And barring any unexpected orbital perturbations, it'll come back to exactly the same spot in space relative to the ISS that it was lost from.

CJ

I know absolutely nothing of orbital mechanics, how long will they have to wait for it to come back, are we talking 24hr. orbit or what??
They  should to make her catch the bag when it comes back around...

Take it out of her paycheck.

Weren't they doing a major remodel of the bathroom and sleeping area on this trip?

I thought traditionally men did the outside work, and women jumped on the chance to redo an interior room.

she is a taliban mole.. she did it on purpose to take out one of the KH's  

Don't worry.
The next shuttle will be seeing those tools again.

At 24,600 feet per second.

My wife leaves my tools all over the place, as well.
Women should need a FOID (TOID ?) to purchase, own and use tools.

What a tool.......................

And DrFrige thought he had it bad.

I'll bet she catches some heat for losing her purse in space. I hope she didn't have her CCW in there too.

I bought my wife a cheap set of tools at Harbor Freight, just so she would stay away from mine in the garage.

She left one of my Snap-On screwdrivers laying in the grass that I found about a month later

Out the airlock with her

They don't have kitchens in space?

Does she need to fill out a Missing Tool Report?  Call QA.

Contents of the tool bag:

I was watching this live on the NASA feed at work, it was pretty damn funny.

Found it with the lawn mower, eh?

Look! there's my tool bag...   Look! there's my tool bag...   Look, there's my tool bag...   Look, tool bag...   Tool bag

I'd hit that in space....

Except for the fact that it's moving away from the ISS.  It's not like they can open the window and grab it on the next orbit.

It would be very funny to send that astronaut one of those tool sets...with a rope tied and taped to every piece.  


The flying tool bag will return to its original starting point in the orbit, in one orbit of the earth, I believe.


Here's how it works.


Suppose you're standing on top of the shuttle and the shuttle is in what you and I would
consider to be the proper flying attitude.  Nose pointing along the path of travel,  bottom
side facing earth.


If you were to throw an object upward, it has more energy and will fly into a slightly higher
orbit but it's not a circular orbit.   It'll be an elliptical orbit.   The tool will rise, relative to
the shutttle's orbit, but as it hasn't been given additional forward velocity, it will appear
to fall behind the shuttle as it rises.   it will eventually reach its own orbital peak (apogee)
and after that it will start to descend, still falling behind the shuttle's path.   Once it
crosses the orbital path of the shuttle, behind it,  it will now start gaining on the shuttle
as its forward velocity is now MORE than it has to have to maintain a stable orbit below
the shuttle.  So as it's falling below the shuttle it's gaining on it.  

When it reaches the low point of its orbit,  it will then start climbing again (relative to the
shuttle) and will continue to gain on it.  

Eventually,  it will pass through the point at which its orbit began.    In this case it would
bounce off the bottom of the shuttle,  with as much velocity as you tossed it with.

Seen from the side, the path of the upward-tossed object would be roughly circular.  Up
and back,  down and back,  down and forward, up and forward.

An object tossed into a LOWER orbit than the shuttle would do much the same thing
but in reverse.  It would go down and forward, then go up and forward, then go up and
back, then down and back.   A circular relative path.

Sideways tosses will result in a different form of path but it must eventually cross paths
with the shuttle again as the two paths would be non-parallel and thus must eventually
cross when both are in orbit around a spherical object.

To really lose something, you'd have to kick it forward or backward.  Forward to put it into
a higher energy orbit, averaging higher than the shuttle's orbit,  backwards to put it into
a lower energy orbit, averaging  lower than the shuttle's orbit.   But I can't quite guarantee
that you'd never encounter the object again in your path.  I know a LITTLE about orbital
mechanics, but I'm hardly an expert.


CJ


CJ

I believe that if you tossed a wrench from the shuttle towards Earth,
It never finds an orbit because it has an angular velocity the same
as the shuttle.  That velocity isn't enough to maintain orbit
at a distance closer to Earth, so it will fall into the atmosphere.

Women can't find their purse here on the ground.  Who the F' would expect them to keep it handy in space.

The days of US / NASA greatness is over.

Sure there have been two screwups by our famale astronautical personel but HEY...we can all feel good in our diversity now can't we??????????????

You're killing me.

And I believe you would be wrong.  Throwing the wrench down toward earth
results in a higher orbital velocity which demands a HIGHER orbit, not a LOWER one,
so the new orbit for the wrench would be an elliptical orbit that intersects the shuttle's
orbit twice per orbit, and would AVERAGE out to be a little bit HIGHER than the
shuttle's orbit.   Throwing the wrench down results in a higher "vertical component"
in its orbital parameters than the shuttle but the forward velocity component would
be the same.   However, as we're talking about pure vector sums here, the
net result is a faster, higher orbit with a lower perigee and higher apogee than
the shuttles' orbit.    

The wrench would go down, forward, then up, past the shuttle's height, up more, back,
and eventually bounce off the top of the shuttle,  as seen from the perspective of
the guy who threw the wrench.

Its losing velocity and reentering the atmosphere due to friction with the upper
atmosphere really wouldn't be an issue for any item that could be thrown by hand.
You just can't impart THAT much of a velocity difference to do it in any reasonable
amount of time.

The lowest shuttle orbits would take several weeks to decay to the point that atmospheric
re-entry would occur.  The ISS is respectably higher than that.   You'd have to slow the
wrench down by several hundred MPH to drop it into the atmosphere in less than several weeks.


If you did want to drop something out of orbit,  the thing to do is to remove as much orbital velocity as is possible.  This would be most efficiently done by throwing it back
along the path the shuttle has been taking.

Now for a question for the intermediate class:   If you wanted to effect the MOST change
in average orbital altitude during an elliptical orbit,  at what point in the orbit would you
want to slam on the brakes?   Apogee? Perigee?  Or somewhere in between?


CJ

"Oh great!"

Oh great?  

Clearly NASA erred by giving tools to a woman.

never ever loan anyone your tools

According to AP that tool set cost about $100,000.

Man, I gave my wife a hard time when she lost a $20 tool.

So... she's the first woman to loose her purse in space?

That's her last mission.

Leave it to a woman to lose the tools.


She probably used a wrench as an improvised hammer and a butter knife when she couldn't find the screwdriver.