Philippine Daily Inquirer Digital Edition

MISFIRE THROWS INT’L SPACE STATION OUT OF CONTROL—NASA

The International Space Station (ISS) was thrown briefly out of control on Thursday when jet thrusters of a newly arrived Russian research module inadvertently fired a few hours after it was docked to the orbiting outpost, Nasa said.

The seven crew members aboard—two Russian cosmonauts, three Nasa astronauts, a Japanese astronaut and a European space agency astronaut from France—were never in any immediate danger, according to Nasa and Russian stateowned news agency RIA.

Thursday’s mishap began about three hours after the multipurpose Nauka module had latched onto the space station, as mission controllers in Moscow were performing postdocking “reconfiguration” procedures, according to Nasa.

The module’s jets inexplicably restarted, causing the entire station to pitch out of its normal flight position some 250 miles above the Earth, leading the mission’s flight director to declare a “spacecraft emergency,” US space agency officials said.

An unexpected drift in the station’s orientation was first detected by automated ground sensors, followed 15 minutes later by a “loss of attitude control” that lasted a little over 45 minutes, according to Joel Montalbano, manager of Nasa’s space station program.

‘Tug-of-war’

Flight teams on the ground managed to restore the space station’s orientation by activating thrusters on another module of the orbiting platform, Nasa officials said.

In its broadcast coverage of the incident, RIA cited Nasa specialists at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, as describing the struggle to regain control of the space station as a “tug of war” between the two modules.

At the height of the incident, the station was pitching out of alignment at the rate of about a half a degree per second, Montalbano said tol reporters.

The Nauka engines were ultimately switched off, the space station was stabilized and its orientation was restored to where it had begun, Nasa said.

Communication with the crew was lost for several minutes twice during the disruption, but “there was no immediate danger at any time to the crew,” Montalbano said.

He said “the crew really didn’t feel any movement.”

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2021-07-31T07:00:00.0000000Z

2021-07-31T07:00:00.0000000Z

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Philippine Daily Inquirer