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Originally Posted by TheLegacy
I thought it was keeping up at the same speed as the shuttle? If that is true then it can't be just floating junk or something that fell out
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Anything in orbit is basically in a freefall due to gravity, the rockets aren't firing all the time. When the spacecraft slows down due to atmospheric drag and starts dropping too low due to gravity, they fire thrusters to get it back up to the desired orbit.
So if the object was keeping roughly the same orbit as the shuttle, it lends weight to the idea it was something that fell off the shuttle.
It was moving at 1 or 2 feet per second
relative to the shuttle and away from the shuttle, not it's actual speed relative to the Earth which like the shuttle would be around 20,000 miles an hour or so...again lending weight to the idea it was forcefully ejected or broke off the shuttle when they fired some engines earlier.
Just hope it wasn't part of the heat shield or some other vital part. They might even send them back to the ISS to fix it, but the soyuz is about to dock there with the next crew so not sure if they have the facilities for two dockings at once
