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The International Space Station tilted briefly from its normal position in orbit during test firing of thrusters on one of Russia’s docked spacecraft on Friday.
Russian space agency announced in a statement on their website He said the crew and the station were never in danger. but it was second such emergency at the station Since July, when an unexpected thruster firing on a new Russian module briefly reversed the outpost.
The incident occurred Friday morning while Russian astronaut Oleg Novitsky was testing the engines on the Soyuz MS-18 spacecraft, a crew module docked with the station since April. The spacecraft is scheduled to return three passengers to Earth on Sunday.
Russian officials and staff in Moscow NASAAstronaut headquarters in Houston took action during the incident and ordered its astronauts to initiate emergency protocols.
“Oleg, calm down, the station is rotated 57 degrees, it doesn’t matter,” said a Russian mission control official in Moscow. interfax, a Russian news agency. “We needed to make sure the engines were working properly, that’s important.”
“Station, Houston space-to-ground two, we see the loss of attitude control alert” NASA Mission control in Houston alerted its astronauts on the station and instructed the crew to begin emergency procedures in the “warning book.”
Russia’s space agency Roscosmos said in a statement that the space station was “temporarily reorientated”, but that its normal position was “rapidly rebounded” with the intervention of Russian experts in Moscow. A Roscosmos spokesperson declined to provide additional details about the incident, and NASA did not immediately respond to requests for further information.
“As you can imagine, when things start to get derailed like this, there’s enough noise on the radar that the clarity of what’s really going on is a bit of a mystery,” said Timothy Creamer, NASA flight director. Time told the American astronauts in communication shortly after the propellant firings stopped. While it’s unclear what type it was, he said the Russian thrusters may have stopped firing after reaching a border.
“Moscow is checking this and doing the data analysis,” said Mr Creamer.
On Sunday, the same spacecraft that experienced the thruster event is expected to bring back to Earth a Russian film crew that flew to the station on a different Soyuz spacecraft on October 5. noted that the propellant firing event delayed a planned film shoot in a six-window room on the station’s dome, facing the Earth. The Russian space agency declined to say whether the incident would affect the planned return of the crew.
In July, Russia deployed the Nauka module to its orbital base and added a new room for science experiments in the Russian segment of the station. Hours later, Nauka’s thrusters suddenly started shooting, rotated the station one and a half revolutions—about 540 degrees—before it stopped upside down.
Unexpected jolts on the football field-sized space station stress the instrumentation forest on its exterior. After the Nauka incident, NASA flight director Zebulon Scoville managing the agency’s emergency response that day, said on Twitter “He has never been happier to see all solar arrays + radiators still installed.”
NASA and Russia have maintained a long relationship on the space station over the past two decades. But in recent years, elements of the station have shown signs of their age, including some air leaks on the Russian side.
NASA wants to continue its partnership with Russia and keep the station operational until 2030, gradually transferring the American elements of the laboratory to private US companies. But Russia’s space chief, Dmitri Rogozin, has suggested that Moscow may withdraw from the orbital partnership in 2025, one of the latest signals that ties between the two space powers are beginning to fray.
Russia has accelerated China’s relationship with the space program. The two countries signed an agreement in March to work on lunar bases that would rival plans for NASA’s Artemis lunar exploration program.
China launched the first elements own new space station posted this year Its second crew of three astronauts was there on Friday. for a six-month assignment.
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