How does one leave behind a floating tool bag in space? Astronaut Heide Stefanyshyn Piper is best-placed to answer because believe it or not this is exactly what happened with her earlier this month. A series of events contrived for this freak accident to occur. Heidi was paying a routine visit to the International Space Station (ISS) which orbits the earth so that she and her friends could grease a few creaking doors and put putty of a few broken solar panels. Heidi was spacewalking and in the middle of the exercise a grease gun went off in the tool bag. The aggrieved tool bag finding the ignominy of having its insides coated with grease too much to handle decided to slink off into space. The tool bag slipped off its tether and drifted away into nothingness. Worse, the maintenance exercise could not be completed.
Watch the video after the break
The tool bag cost a cool $100K (yes, I know it’s not fair). It has now become one of the many thousand pieces of junk floating into space. These include gloves, nuts and bolts, a golf ball, a robotic arm, Soviet nuclear reactor cores and such mundane stuff. The not-so-mundane part is that this space debris can reach speeds of up to 20,000 miles per hour.
The good news is that the errant tool bag has been spotted over the Canadian night sky and the alert amateur has made a video of it. NASA would like to reclaim the tool bag before it slams into one of the many geo-stationary satellites up there.
As an aside, the scientists who went up to the ISS had carried two spiders with them to find out if the arachnids could weave webs in space. The guys have come back with only one spider.
Check out these videos of the floating tool bag.
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