Untitled
MOSCOW (AP) -- A technical malfunction, not crew error, caused the unexpectedly steep and off-course landing of the Soyuz spacecraft that brought two American astronauts and a Russian cosmonaut home from the International Space Station, Russian investigators announced Monday.
Nikolai Zelenshchikov, who headed the investigative commission, said the Russian Soyuz aircraft "entered a tough, ballistic descent because of a malfunction in the control system," the ITAR-Tass news agency reported.
Russian cosmonaut Nikolai Budarin and American astronauts Kenneth Bowersox and Donald Pettit landed in the barren Kazakh steppe on May 4 nearly 300 miles short of their planned arrival site after enduring severe gravitational overloads.
Their rough descent -- and the nearly two hours it took rescuers to find them _ gave Russian and U.S. officials a scare. Tension had already been high because it was the first return to Earth since the shuttle Columbia broke up during re-entry in February, killing all seven crew members.
It also was the first time U.S. astronauts had returned on a Russian craft. NASA is depending on the Soyuz ships to keep the space station manned while the U.S. shuttle fleet is grounded pending an investigation into the Columbia disaster.
Zelenshchikov, deputy chief designer of RKK Energiya, was quoted by the Interfax news agency as saying that specialists had found no problems with the new software installed on the Soyuz spacecraft. Nor did they discover any errors by the crew, who had expected to return home on board a shuttle.
An instrument that had been used for 25 years to control the spaceships' descent failed, Interfax quoted Zelenshchikov as saying.
He said the commission investigating the off-course landing will continue its work because ``experts have been unable so far to reproduce the situation in which this happened,'' ITAR-Tass reported.
However, he added, "it is clear already now how the instrument must be modified so that it will become more reliable."
Investigators also recommended changes in the way Russia tracks returning spacecraft, calling for more planes and helicopters to be positioned along the entire trajectory.
"Because of chronic underfinancing, we are short of the hardware -- of 28 helicopters normally appropriate for the search and rescue service, only 12 remain, and of nine planes, three are left," ITAR-Tass quoted cosmonaut Pavel Vinogradov, a commission member, as saying.
Russia's TVS reported that the commission also recommended all future Soyuz crafts be equipped with satellite communications technology. That way, even if the craft isn't spotted from the air, space officials won't have to sit through another nail-biting wait to know if the crew survived. A satellite phone is expected to be sent up on a cargo mission later this year and given to the crew already on the space station for use on its return home.
The Soyuz crew had its communications cut off because one antenna was ripped off during the descent, two others didn't open at touchdown and another opened toward the ground. It managed to alert space officials by setting up an emergency antenna, Zelenshchikov said.
advertisement
