![]() ![]() We're back in attitude control, rates are stable." But a few moments, later Morgan added "we can report that the MLM thrusters are no longer firing. He was referring to the space station's next pass over Russian ground stations, which allowed direct high-data-rate communications.Īs a precaution, the station crew re-oriented NASA's solar arrays to minimize any effects of rocket plume impingement. We think at this rate, it's going to take us about 20 minutes or so to get back in attitude control, but we're going to get more insight when we get commanding back to MLM, which is still about an hour away." "We're sorting through the best course of action right now."Ī few minutes later, Morgan told the crew "the SM thrusters are effectively countering the MLM thrusters. "Just to update you guys, right now we're in a little bit of a tug of war between thrusters firing from both the SM (Zvezda) and the MLM (Nauka)," astronaut Drew Morgan radioed the station from NASA's mission control center in Houston. While the crew did not feel any shaking or vibration, the changing attitude was noted by computers in mission control and aboard the lab complex. ![]() A closeup of the new Nauka - "Science" - module after docking at the space station's Zvezda module.ĭata indicating the station's orientation in pitch, roll and yaw suddenly started changing. It's not yet known what might have caused the Nauka module's thrusters to suddenly begin firing as cosmonauts Oleg Novitskiy and Pyotr Dubrov were in the process of "integrating" the new spacecraft with the station's computer systems. But the crew was never in any, like, immediate emergency or anything like that." "Obviously, when you have a loss of attitude control, that's something you want to address right away. "There was no immediate danger at any time to the crew," he said. Montalbano said the station's seven crew members were never in any danger. A few minutes later, thrusters in a Progress cargo ship docked on the other side of Zvezda kicked in with additional muscle.Ī "spacecraft emergency" was declared at the outset, but that was standard procedure in such cases, giving the lab complex priority over other spacecraft using NASA's satellite communications network. The Russian Nauka laboratory module closes in on the International Space Station during the final stages of a carefully choreographed rendezvous.Īttitude control was quickly handed off to more effective rocket motors in the Russian Zvezda module, where Nauka was attached. The gyros were unable to counteract the unwanted push from Nauka's jets, and the space station, stretching the length of a football field with a mass of more than 930,000 pounds, began tilting away from its normal orientation. EDT, about three hours after the 44,000-pound Nauka multi-purpose laboratory glided in for docking. Space station program manager Joel Montalbano said the station was maintaining its orientation, or "attitude," using massive NASA-supplied gyroscopes when the thruster firings suddenly began at 12:34 p.m. But in a moment of unexpected drama, inadvertent thruster firings briefly knocked the sprawling complex out of its normal orientation. This time the station received initial alerts for the potential collision approximately 30 hours ahead of the satellite’s projected closest approach.A heavyweight Russian laboratory module that experienced a variety of problems after launch last week docked at the International Space Station on Thursday. Just last year two path corrections were made by the ISS to avoid debris flying from the Cosmos 1408 satellite, which Russia destroyed in an anti-satellite (ASAT) weapons test in November 2021, Space reported. Maneuvers to avoid collision with ISS is uncommon as the space station has already made a total 32 course corrections to avoid satellites and trackable space debris since 1999, according to a 2022 NASA report. Jonathan McDowell, astronomer and astrophysicist at the Harvard–Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, tweeted the Nusat constellation is one of several whose orbits are slowly encroaching on the ISS’s orbit. The Argentinian Earth-observation satellite, launched in 2020, Nusat-17, is operated by the geospatial data company Satellogic. Thrusters on the Progress 83 resupply vessel docked on the ISS, were fired for a little more than six minutes to raise the station’s orbit and prevent a collision. The International Space Station (ISS) was compelled to move out of the way of an Earth-imaging satellite that was directly in its path. ![]()
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