Sun, Apr 25, 2004
Report #22, 3 p.m. CDT, Friday, April 23, 2004
New crewmembers aboard the International Space Station settled
into a routine of handover briefings and scientific experiments
after their arrival early Wednesday.
Expedition 9's Commander Gennady Padalka and NASA ISS Science
Officer Mike Fincke docked their ISS Soyuz 8 spacecraft to the
nadir port of the Zarya Control Module at 12:01 a.m. CDT Wednesday.
They opened hatches and boarded the station about an hour later,
beginning a six-month stay.
With them on the Soyuz was European Space Agency Astronaut Andre
Kuipers of the Netherlands, who will spend nine days aboard the
Station conducting scientific investigations. Kuipers will return
to Earth with Expedition 8's Commander Michael Foale and Flight
Engineer Alexander Kaleri. Foale and Kaleri arrived on the Station
last October 20.
Their ISS Soyuz 7 capsule is scheduled to undock from the
Station's Pirs Docking Compartment, where it has been during
Expedition 8's stay on the Station, at 3:52 p.m. CDT April 29. The
landing is scheduled for 7:10 p.m. CDT the same day on the steppes
of Kazakhstan.
Early Thursday, during their Daily Planning Conference,
crewmembers were told that one of the Station's three operating
Control Moment Gyroscopes, CMG 2, had gone off line at about 3:20
p.m. CDT on Wednesday. The CMGs (shown below) use power from the
solar arrays to control the Station's orientation. Flight
controllers traced the problem to a Remote Power Controller Module
(RPCM), a kind of remotely controlled circuit breaker, that had
malfunctioned and cut off power to the gyroscope. The RPCM is
mounted on the top of the Station's central truss segment, above
the U.S. Laboratory Destiny.
Two CMGs continue to operate well and are sufficient for
controlling the Station's orientiation until the RPCM can be
replaced. Flight controllers have begun planning a spacewalk that
will likely be conducted sometime in the next month to replace the
RPCM with a spare unit and restore operation of CMG-2. A spare RPCM
is aboard the Station.
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