Archive for the ‘NASA’ Category
A ground crew member checked the level of radiation near the Soyuz capsule after its landing.
Although NASA is concerned about last weekend’s rough, off-target landing of a Russian Soyuz spacecraft carrying three astronauts, an agency official expressed confidence on Tuesday that the Russians would solve the problem.
The Soyuz capsule, carrying a crew home from the International Space Station, made a steeper-than-normal re-entry early Saturday and landed in Kazakhstan about 260 miles short of its target.
Russian and American officials said the astronauts — Dr. Peggy A. Whitson of NASA; the Russian capsule commander, Col. Yuri I. Malenchenko; and a South Korean bioengineer, Yi So-yeon — had been exposed to twice the normal stresses of gravity, but were not harmed. They remain in Russia for normal postflight debriefings and examinations.
William Gerstenmaier, NASA’s associate administrator for space operations, told reporters Tuesday that the incident was “clearly a concern” to the agency but that it was too early to judge the impact on future space flights.
Mr. Gerstenmaier said there had been a problem with the Soyuz descent module separating as planned from a propulsion module. This was the second consecutive Soyuz re-entry with a separation problem, he said, noting that a return last October also ended in a steeper-than-normal “ballistic re-entry.”
The Soyuz has explosive bolts that are supposed to separate its three sections before the center descent module carrying the astronauts assumes a normal re-entry orientation with its heat shield down. If the other modules do not break away as planned, Mr. Gerstenmaier said, the heat and forces of re-entry are supposed to pull them apart.
If this does not happen, the descent module could be damaged or destroyed by returning through the atmosphere at the wrong angle.
Mr. Gerstenmaier cautioned against giving too much credence to initial reports out of Russia that the astronauts had been in extraordinary danger, noting that the Soyuz had been safely launched and recovered for decades and that there was “an inherent reliability in the system.”
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