Time.news – An accident at the Russian laboratory just arrived at the landing destabilized the International Space Station (ISS) for 47 minutes. The scientists who oversee the mission have made it known. The ISS has lost alignment due to a technical problem (the sudden ignition of the engines) of the scientific laboratory, Nauka, which had recently arrived on the ISS after eight days of travel. Both the Russians and the Americans have however assured that the seven crew members aboard the International Space Station have never been in danger.
A few hours after docking, the cosmonauts reported the unexpected ignition of Nauka’s engines, forcing the engines of the Russian ISS segment to ignite to compensate for the movement produced on the orbital laboratory. “The thrusters started working unexpectedly and inadvertently, moving the station 45 degrees out of position,” NASA said.
Communication between the station and the ground controllers was also interrupted twice for a few minutes. Joel Montalbano, head of the NASA space station program, explained that, at the height of the accident, the ISS lost alignment at a rate of about half a degree per second. However, NASA has assured that the crew “has never been and is not in any danger”, indeed that the crew “has not actually felt any movement”.
Then the ground team regained control of the situation and the movement of the space station became stable again. The NASA flight manager, Kathy Lueders, however, acknowledged that the incident was “really engaging” and thanked the crew who passed it without problems.
The ISS however reported that Dragon, the SpaceX program spacecraft, launched by millionaire Elon Musk, currently moored on the international station, was ready to evacuate the crew if necessary. The accident now has cobstructed to postpone the test launch until 3 August of the unmanned Boeing Starliner spacecraft to the Space Station.
After the docking of the new Russian Multipurpose Laboratory Module (MLM), renamed “Nauka”, on Thursday at 15:29 (Italian time) on the International Space Station (ISS), the Russian cosmonauts on board, components of the Expedition 65 mission, have performed routine leak checks between Nauka and the service module.
At 6:45 pm (Italian time) the flight control team noticed the unplanned ignition of the MLM thrusters which caused the entire space station to move. The ground crews have regained control of the attitude and the movement of the space station has been stabilized.
After the opening of the first of the two hatches separating the Nauka module from the ISS by the two cosmonauts Oleg Novitsky and Petr Dubrov, there was the unplanned ignition of the maneuvering rockets of the new Russian module which caused a rapid change of attitude for the entire International Space Station. The rotation was immediately interrupted by returning the station to its original position thanks to the thrusters of the Progress MS-17 (78P) capsule, the Russian supply shuttle docked to the Poisk module.
NASA and Roscosmos specify that the crew has never been in danger and the flight controllers of the Mission Control in Houston are monitoring the status of the space station. The teams are also monitoring the impact on today’s launch of the Boeing Starliner spacecraft to the ISS.
Nauka is a multipurpose laboratory module for the Russian segment of the International Space Station. It was created by the cooperation of enterprises in order to implement the scientific experiment program and expand the functionality of the Russian segment of the ISS. After its commissioning, the Russian segment will receive additional space for the organization of workplaces and storage of goods, placement of equipment for water and oxygen regeneration.
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