HOUSTON -- Russian
flight controllers for the International Space Station (ISS) restored contact
with a pair of vital computers aboard the orbital laboratory early Thursday
after a major failure left the outpost dependent on U.S. systems and NASA's shuttle
Atlantis for attitude control.
NASA ISS flight director Holly Ridings said efforts to recover
the failed computers overnight appeared to payoff as engineers reactivated
communications with main systems in the station's Russian-built Zvezda service
module and the Zarya control module.
"It looks
like they've made a lot of progress overnight," Ridings said in a status report, adding
that Russian Mission Control is now receiving telemetry from the station's
Russian segments. "There're some cleanup steps to do still, and some
investigation."
Efforts to
bring the computers back up to full operations are underway.
An
unexplained glitch shutdown primary Russian computers aboard the ISS early
Wednesday, leaving it dependent on the station's U.S. gyroscopes and thrusters
aboard Atlantis for attitude control and other primary systems. The issue left mission
managers contemplating a one-day extension to the space shuttle Atlantis crew's
already
extended 13-day mission to give additional time to work through the glitch.
This
morning, astronauts aboard Atlantis were given the go ahead by Mission Control
here at NASA's Johnson Space Center to power down non-essential shuttle systems
should that one-day extension be required, but a final decision on the
lengthening the mission has not been made, NASA said.
Atlantis'
STS-117 astronauts are currently scheduled to return to Earth on June 21.
Ridings
said that engineers are continuing to troubleshoot the Russian computer issues,
but a number of positive steps occurred early Thursday. Russian ISS engineers speculated
that glitch is a power problem, possibly related to the installation this week
of new
starboard solar arrays at the ISS, NASA said.
ISS
Expedition 15 commander Fyodor Yurchikhin, a Russian cosmonaut, worked with flight
controllers earlier today and reported that both of the computers under study were
available and rebooting at about 7:02 a.m. EDT (1102 GMT). A few minutes later,
power was restored to the station's Zarya control module, NASA said.
The effort to
restore communications with the computers did prompt a false fire alarm aboard
the ISS, the second this
week spawned by a computer glitch. But Ridings said that, as previously,
there was no evidence an actual fire had occurred.
By 7:46
a.m. EDT (1146) a Soyuz spacecraft docked the ISS, which was switched to its
own internal batteries late Wednesday as a power-saving measure, was once more
drawing power from the ISS, NASA added.
"It has
been a very positive sort of morning," NASA spokesperson John Ira Petty told SPACE.com.
NASA is
broadcasting the space shuttle Atlantis' STS-117 mission live on NASA TV. Click here for mission updates and
SPACE.com's video feed.
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