Timeline for How many kilograms of nickel particles will be dispersed in Earth's atmosphere by dumping old ISS batteries overboard?
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
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| Dec 2, 2023 at 11:08 | history | edited | uhoh | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| S Jan 16, 2023 at 12:08 | history | bounty ended | CommunityBot | ||
| S Jan 16, 2023 at 12:08 | history | notice removed | CommunityBot | ||
| Jan 8, 2023 at 23:24 | comment | added | uhoh | @RegenerativelyCooledAstronaut meteors come in all sizes! From planet-killers to boulders to something you can pick up to dust. If you have a source that confirms that the batteries were designed to break up upon reentry, then that could be the basis of at least a partial answer. They don't get particularly hot, even though atmospheric entry is a lot faster than that from low Earth orbit. See also Have "frosty meteorites" ever been observed soon after landing? Are there photos? | |
| Jan 8, 2023 at 23:24 | comment | added | AnarchoEngineer | Also, the faster you go the hotter it gets, and the faster the meteor would break apart. However there is a point where you go fast enough that you get to the surface before you can melt... That's what makes really fast medium-sized objects dangerous. | |
| Jan 8, 2023 at 23:22 | comment | added | AnarchoEngineer | A nickel meteor making it to the surface is unusual, compared to the number of them that reach the upper atmosphere, as is the case with most fast-moving space objects that aren't either made to make it down or are just really thick metals. | |
| Jan 8, 2023 at 23:21 | comment | added | AnarchoEngineer | @uhoh And that's because the meteors are fairly large, fully solid, and not designed to break apart... | |
| Jan 8, 2023 at 23:20 | comment | added | uhoh | @RegenerativelyCooledAstronaut and yet nickel meteors make it to the surface in one piece. | |
| Jan 8, 2023 at 23:20 | comment | added | AnarchoEngineer | I would think that the batteries would not make it down in any large solid state, merely as dust, after cooling. | |
| Jan 8, 2023 at 23:19 | comment | added | AnarchoEngineer | @uhoh the nickel would break to pieces due to a low melting point, it might even vaporise fully, seeing as NASA and the ESA generally don't like whole pieces of anything getting back down unless there's people on them! They probably build the batteries to be easily broken into pieces that vaporise or become plasma on the way back through atmo. | |
| S Jan 8, 2023 at 10:06 | history | bounty started | uhoh | ||
| S Jan 8, 2023 at 10:06 | history | notice added | uhoh | Draw attention | |
| Nov 9, 2021 at 14:32 | comment | added | Ilmari Karonen | Regarding oxide film formation on flying molten aluminum droplets, I just ran into an article about just that (in the context of aluminum arc spraying): inldigitallibrary.inl.gov/sites/sti/sti/3169832.pdf Apparently the airflow causes the liquid aluminum in the droplet to circulate, which breaks up the oxide layer and mixes it into the droplet, constantly exposing new molten aluminum to air (which produces heat that keeps the droplet molten). While the air pressures and velocities in the paper probably differ quite a bit from re-entry, I'd still expect at least qualitative similarity. | |
| May 26, 2021 at 18:00 | history | tweeted | twitter.com/StackSpaceExp/status/1397613523480584193 | ||
| Mar 16, 2021 at 14:04 | history | edited | uhoh | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| Mar 15, 2021 at 17:28 | comment | added | user39728 | Interesting questions! I did fuel cells and learned about oxides only for corrosion, so unfortunately I know nothing about aluminum mirrors. Al2O3 is very stable, but I suppose it can grow enough over time to degrade the reflectivity of the mirror... You seem to know way more about this than I do :D | |
| Mar 15, 2021 at 4:23 | comment | added | uhoh | @user39728 speaking of aluminum: Do primary mirrors in large observatories undergo regular removal and re-coating of the aluminum? Why? and When did “resilvering” large telescope mirrors actually refer to aluminization, and why was it necessary? | |
| Mar 15, 2021 at 3:44 | comment | added | user39728 | It actually depends on the oxide film that forms. If it were aluminum, the film would block the diffusion of oxygen through the metal, so the oxidation would stop and the rest of the metal would be protected and stay pure. If it were iron, the oxide would form porous scales through which oxygen would diffuse to keep eating away at the iron inside until eventually only iron oxide was left. I think Nickel is more like iron than aluminum, but I don't remember. | |
| Mar 15, 2021 at 3:35 | comment | added | uhoh | @user39728 Thanks for the info; I've never actually seen a clean, pure nickel surface. I'm wondering; the surface may oxidize in a few minutes but to what depth? Atmospheric entry happens pretty fast, things melt, boil, explode sometimes, so if the nickel plates can be turned into tiny particles quickly then much more surface will be exposed to oxygen molecules. | |
| Mar 15, 2021 at 3:02 | comment | added | user39728 | I actually worked with Nickel in the lab in grad school. The pure metal oxidizes super fast in the atmosphere at high temperatures (e.g., if it's burning like a meteorite). We'll get lots of Nickel oxide, but probably no metallic nickel is my guess. | |
| Mar 15, 2021 at 2:59 | comment | added | user39728 | Wait. So let me get this. We're getting Nickelback? No, somebody stop the music :D | |
| Mar 15, 2021 at 1:31 | comment | added | uhoh | @Tristan thanks, yes I've updated accordingly. I'd never heard of them but wow they've a long heritage of powering spacecraft, including Hubble. | |
| Mar 15, 2021 at 1:30 | history | edited | uhoh | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| Mar 15, 2021 at 1:28 | comment | added | uhoh | @PM2Ring different but related: Are the ejected first stage Electron rocket batteries really incinerated? | |
| Mar 14, 2021 at 6:04 | comment | added | Tristan | Note that the batteries on ISS were nickel-hydrogen, not nickel-metal-hydride. They contained gaseous hydrogen. | |
| Mar 14, 2021 at 1:59 | comment | added | uhoh | @PM2Ring that might be the case, but "guaranteed to burn" doesn't necessarily mean stoichiometric combustion down to the molecular level. "Burns up in the atmosphere" is just a nice sounding phrase, but a good answer here will find a source where the process is addressed and particulate formation has been estimated. | |
| Mar 13, 2021 at 20:51 | comment | added | PM 2Ring | Sure. When micrometeorites are small enough, their terminal velocity is so small that they don't burn, they just slowly settle. Whereas a pallet of stuff is guaranteed to burn, and to do so at a high temperature. | |
| Mar 13, 2021 at 20:03 | comment | added | uhoh | @PM2Ring but the altitudes and vaporization processes for micrometeorites and for a pallet full of batteries are probably very different, and so their yields of PM2.5 class particles might differ greatly. I don't know which way, thus the question as asked. | |
| Mar 13, 2021 at 16:51 | comment | added | Organic Marble | Possibly too broad, parts 1 and 2 seem very different. I could probably answer part 1 but no clue on 2. Not the downvoter though. | |
| Mar 13, 2021 at 12:13 | comment | added | PM 2Ring | Each day, roughly 43.3 (metric) tons of meteoric matter enters the Earth's atmosphere. That material is ~1.72% nickel. So we get ~740 kg of nickel per day from natural sources. (FWIW, there's a fairly wide range of values for the total meteoroid flux on the Net, ranging from 10⁷ to 10⁹ kg/year, but the value I used seems to be the one most frequently used in recent work). | |
| Mar 13, 2021 at 7:03 | history | edited | uhoh | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| Mar 13, 2021 at 6:58 | history | edited | uhoh | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| Mar 13, 2021 at 6:45 | history | asked | uhoh | CC BY-SA 4.0 |