The International Space Station is still recovering from a mishap that could have led to a major tragedy in microgravity. While Nasa and Roscomos have maintained that the 'incident' was handled, it has turned out that the situation was more serious than what the space agencies had earlier reported.
While the agencies maintained that the Space Station spun by 45 degrees, a new report suggests it was way more than that. According to the report, the flying outpost spun one-and-a-half revolutions — about 540 degrees — before coming to a stop upside down, relative to its original position.
According to a report in The New York Times, Zebulon Scoville, the flight director who was in charge at Nasa's mission control centre in Houston said that the incident was not correctly reported and that after a 540-degree spun, "the space station then did a 180-degree forward flip to get back to its original orientation."
“We had two messages — just two lines of code — saying that something was wrong,” Scoville said adding that engineers first considered it to be a false message.
"And then I looked up at the video monitors and saw all the ice and thruster firings. This is no kidding. A real event. So let’s get to it. You get about half a breath of ‘Oh, geez, what now?’ and then you kind of push that down and just work the problem,” he told New York Times.
While astronauts were not in any immediate danger from the incident, the sudden spin led to stresses on the structure and equipment on the 900,000-pound International Space Station that has been a hotbed of experimentation in microgravity.
Graphic showing the Nauka module docked with the Space Station. (Photo: Nasa)
Nasa had to activate other additional antennas to communicate with the station after it turned upside down as the agency declared a spacecraft emergency.
What was initially reported?
The mishap happened when the jet thrusters on the new Nauka module, which is replacing the recently discarded Pirs module, inadvertently began firing, causing the entire station to pitch out of its normal flight position in orbit. The new Russian module is docked on the underside of the space station.
"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," Nasa officials had said after the incident. The agency was able to restore the orientation by activating thrusters on another module docked on the Station.
Meanwhile, Vladimir Solovyov, designer general at Energia, a Russian space agency company said that "Due to a short-term software failure, a direct command was mistakenly implemented to turn on the module's engines for withdrawal, which led to some modification of the orientation of the complex as a whole."
