NASA officials said that the International Space Station (ISS) briefly lost control on Thursday when the jet propulsion of the newly arrived Russian research module was accidentally launched a few hours after docking with the orbital outpost.
According to reports from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and the Russian state-owned news agency RIA, the seven crew members on board-two Russian astronauts, three NASA astronauts, one Japanese astronaut and one European Space Agency from France Staff-never faced any direct danger.
But this failure prompted NASA to at least launch Boeing’s new CST-100 Starliner capsule before August 3 for a highly anticipated unmanned test flight to the space station. The Starliner was originally scheduled to launch on an Atlas V rocket from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Friday.
According to NASA, Thursday’s accident occurred about three hours after the multi-purpose Nauka module locked the space station because the mission controller in Moscow was performing some post-docking “reconfiguration” procedures.
NASA officials said that the module’s jet plane restarted inexplicably, causing the entire space station to deviate from its normal flight position about 250 miles above the Earth, causing the mission’s flight director to declare a “spacecraft emergency.”
NASA space station project manager Joel Montalbano (Joel Montalbano) said that the automatic ground sensor first detected an accidental drift in the direction of the space station, and after 15 minutes, “lost attitude control” lasted more than 45 minutes.
“Tug of War”
NASA officials said the ground flight team managed to restore the direction of the space station by activating the thrusters on another module of the orbital platform.
In a broadcast report on the incident, RIA quoted NASA experts at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, describing the struggle to regain control of the space station as a “tug-of-war” between the two modules.
Montalbano said in a conference call between NASA and reporters that at the worst of the incident, the space station deviated from orbit at a rate of about half a degree per second.
NASA said that the Nauka engine was eventually shut down, the space station stabilized, and its direction returned to the starting position.
Montalbano said that during the interruption, communication with the crew was interrupted twice for a few minutes, but “the crew was not in direct danger at any time.” He said: “The crew really didn’t feel any movement.”
Steve Stitch, NASA’s Commercial Crew Program Manager, said that if the situation had become so dangerous that it was necessary to evacuate people, the crew could have escaped in the SpaceX crew cabin still parked at the outpost and used it as necessary if necessary “lifeboat”. .
NASA officials said that the cause of the failure of the thruster on the Nauka module delivered by the Russian Space Agency Roscosmos has not been determined.
Montalbano said that there is currently no sign of any damage to the space station. The flight correction maneuvers consumed more propellant reserves than expected, “but I won’t worry about it,” he said.
After launching from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan last week, the module experienced a series of malfunctions, which raised concerns about whether the docking procedure would proceed smoothly.
According to TASS News Agency, Roscosmos attributed the problem after the docking on Thursday to the fact that Nauka’s engine had to work with residual fuel in the spacecraft.
“The process of transferring the Nauka module from the flight mode to the’Docking International Space Station’ mode is in progress. Work is being done on the remaining fuel in the module,” TASS quoted Roscosmos as saying.
The Nauka module is intended to be used as a research laboratory, storage unit and airlock, and will upgrade Russia’s capabilities on the International Space Station.
The live broadcast showed that the module named after the Russian word “science” was docked with the space station several minutes later than the scheduled time.
“According to telemetry data and reports from the staff of the International Space Station, the space station’s airborne systems and Nauka modules are operating normally,” Roscosmos said in a statement.
“There is a connection!!!” Dmitry Rogozin, the head of Roscosmos, wrote on Twitter shortly after the match.
(Reporting and writing by Steve Gorman in Los Angeles and Polina Ivanova in Moscow, editing by Mark Heinrich, Leslie Adler and Raju Gopalakrishnan)
