A Soyuz Craft Tilted The International Space Station Off Orbit, Again – Mashable India

Astronauts aboard the International Space Station scrambled to take emergency measures after the low-earth orbit station was briefly tilted out of its normal orbit on Friday, last week.

The incident is the latest the increasing number of problems plaguing the aging Russian portion of the space station in the last few years and was caused when a thruster continued to fire for longer than intended.

Prior to the scheduled departure of the Russian actress Yulia Peresild and director Klim Shipenkowho shot the first movie in spaceRussian cosmonaut Oleg Novinsky was completing a routine test of the thruster on the Soyuz MS-18 spacecraft.

The station orbital positioning control was lost at 5.13 a.m. ET, when the thruster firing unexpectedly continued after the end of the test window, NASA said in a blog post.

The craft, which had arrived in April and was docked with the Nauka science module of the ISS, was scheduled to bring the Russian film crew back to Earth.

In a statement, the Russian space agency ROSCOSMOS said that the station and the crew are in no danger, as the altitude control was swiftly recovered due to the actions of the ISS Russian Segment Chief Operating Control Group specialists.

Despite the setbacks, the mission to bring back the Russian film crew went ahead as planned and they safely touched down on the steppes of Kazakhstan on Sunday.

The Russian segments of the ISS are some of the oldest modules in the International Space Station, with some being more than decades old.

While Fridays incident marked the second time a Russian spacecraft had shifted the ISS out of orbit within two months. In July, thrusters on the Nauka science module began firing on their own, tilting the station by over 45 degrees.

Later, the chief engineer of Energia, a leading Russian space firm warned that the International Space Station could face irreparable failure, due to aging hardware.

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A Soyuz Craft Tilted The International Space Station Off Orbit, Again - Mashable India