After nearly four hours of struggle to prevail over a temporary electrical power shortage, the Russia's Mission Control on Thursday successfully managed the docking of an unpiloted Progress 23 cargo craft, at 10:29 a.m. EDT.
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After nearly four hours of struggle to prevail over a temporary electrical power shortage, the Russia's Mission Control on Thursday successfully managed the docking of an unpiloted Progress 23 cargo craft, at 10:29 a.m. EDT.
An unmanned Russian cargo capsule, Progress 23, carrying almost 2.5 tons of food, fuel and supplies for the station's Expedition 14 crew, has automatically docked to the aft port of the Zvezda Service Module, despite difficulty arose in a forward-facing communications antenna.
As per the NASA spokesman James Hartsfield, the glitch that had prevented the craft from hooking up firmly with the orbiting outpost neither endangered the lives of the astronauts nor permanently impaired the 220-mile-high orbital base.
The temporary malfunction was noticed by the Russian ground controllers when, at the time of docking, the antenna used by the Progress' Kurs automated docking system failed to drew in as required. But, after few hours of troubleshooting, the docking operation was completed, space officials said.
"During the second attempt, the metal bar bringing the spacecraft and the ISS together advanced completely and electrical connectors connected successfully," a Mission Control official was cited by a news agency as saying.
If the antenna had not retracted, it could have interfered with the final latching of the supply ship to the station.
"The parameters of the orbit, the parameters of the atmosphere and the state of on-board systems in the Russian ISS segment are back to normal," the Russian Space Agency spokesman Igor Panarin said.
Because of the lengthy operations Thursday, the three-member crew of Expedition 14 including Commander Mike Lopez- Alegria, flight engineers Mikhail Tyurin and Thomas Reiter will open the hatch to the supply ship on Friday. Supplies for the crew include food, fuel, oxygen and air, clothing, experiment hardware and spare parts, as well as parcels from their respective families.
The 23rd Progress, which holds 1,918 pounds of propellant for the Russian thrusters, 110 pounds of oxygen and almost 2,800 pounds of spare parts, experiment hardware and life support components, including parts for the Russian Elektron oxygen-generation system, was launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on Monday at 9:41 a.m. EDT. It reached the station after a flight of just over three days.
Mechanical gyros... hmmmm. What if they were replaced with fluid in a closed loop? Just replace small inline pumps when they go bad. Increase the loop area to compensate for the lower material density by pumping the fluid around the periphery of the vessel...hmmm. I know, leaks, and large volumes are an issue, but still mechanical bearings seem to be an issue with the current technology. Or are the current gyros magnetically mounted, free to spin in a vacuum, with magnetic coupling providing straightening torque?