Thursday, July 29, 2021

The International Space Station lost attitude control for close to an hour today after the new Russian science module docked

Space:

at 12:45 p.m. EDT (1645 GMT), thrusters on Nauka fired "inadvertently and unexpectedly"

...

The unplanned thruster firing caused the orbiting laboratory to tilt by about 45 degrees from its proper orientation before the station was able to right itself, Navias said. All told, the station lost attitude control for a total of about 47 minutes, according to NASA officials.

The space station automatically recognized that Nauka's thrusters were sending the orbiting laboratory askew and ordered the Zvezda module to fire its own thrusters to compensate, a process completed by the robotic Russian Progress 78 cargo ship, which is also docked to the space station.

After the station regained its proper position, Nauka's overseers in Russia began work to ensure the thrusters would not fire mistakenly again