How much brighter does the ISS get with a shuttle attached?

jumpguy

I'm curious as to this one and can't find the answer. Does it get substantially brighter (like 1.5 mag) or does it make not much of a difference seeing as the shuttle doesn't have solar panels?

Also, may aswell ask, how come the ISS is not visible until the small hours of the morning now? Is it because of the orientation of the earth in summer or a more obvious answer? I miss being able to see it in the evening!

Beeker

jumpguy wrote: »

I'm curious as to this one and can't find the answer. Does it get substantially brighter (like 1.5 mag) or does it make not much of a difference seeing as the shuttle doesn't have solar panels?

Also, may aswell ask, how come the ISS is not visible until the small hours of the morning now? Is it because of the orientation of the earth in summer or a more obvious answer? I miss being able to see it in the evening!

Very little difference with the Shuttle attached to the ISS. You can see the ISS mainly due to reflection of the Sun of the solar panels. The Shuttle has no such panels but is over half covered in white heat deflecting tiles which do reflect some sunlight but not enough to make a big difference.
ISS visible in mornings now because of the stations orbit. It has nothing to do with the earths orientation. After a while the ISS will not be visible for a few days and then it will be visible in the evenings before repesting the cycle.
It still passes Ireland every day just sometimes it passes during daylight hours, It is too dim for us to see. Sometimes it passes during the night and is in the Earths shadow so again we can't see it.
We only get to see it for a while after sunset or before sunrise when the sun is below the horizon from where we stand but the ISS is still in sunlight because of its hight above the local horizon.

The Hill Billy

Have a look at Heavens Above. It gives the expected magnitude for each pass of ISS viewable from your location.
As Beeker said though there probably won't be much of a difference with the shuttle docked to it.

Thrill

I read this recently about how you can spot the ISS and the shuttle combined in daylight. (Bottom left hand corner of the picture.).........

ISS IN BROAD DAYLIGHT: After 11 years of construction, the International Space Station has grown so large you can see it in broad daylight. "On June 13th, I was watching a red-headed woodpecker's nest when the ISS passed overhead," says Brooke O'Klatner of Charlotte, North Carolina. Follow the curved branch to find the spaceship:

The station's brightness will increase even more when space shuttle Endeavour arrives later this week (update: Endeavour's trip has been postponed until July). Endeavour will deliver a new "space porch" for Japan's Kibo science lab. It is a platform where science experiments requiring exposure to hard vacuum and radiation can be set outside. The Endeavour+ISS combo will pierce the blue sky of daytime with ease--and just imagine how they will look at night!