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ISS Gyro Fixed Via Spacewalk

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the better-late-than-never dept.

Teahouse writes "After a failed attempt last week, the ISS Astronauts finally got to fix the external gyroscope circut breaker in the station. Tests are being run today, but it looks like the ISS is back to having attitude stability with redundancy. This is particularly significant with the Shuttle being grounded for an extended period because the ISS would have had to use thruster fuel to keep the Station's solar panels pointed in the right direction without the gyroscopes, and no guarantee when more fuel would be arriving."

5 of 143 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Attitude stability? by Xshare · · Score: 5, Informative

    Attitude = The orientation of a spacecraft relative to its direction of motion.

  2. Re:how do gyros work?? by eingram · · Score: 4, Informative

    Maybe this will help? I can't really think of a simple way to explain it. They're a lot of fun to play with, though. :)

  3. Re:Another space station dying of neglect? by RickHunter · · Score: 4, Informative

    Never mind the collossal risk posed by an asteroid strike. Sure, the chances of a species-killer are pretty low, but the downsides are enourmous. Better to start on contingency plans as soon as we can.

  4. Re:Attitude stability? by stuktongue · · Score: 3, Informative

    Disregarding the fact that you're responding seriously to a joke, I'd like to make one minor correction to your thought, just so people understand. A spacecraft's attitude is its orientation relative to some coordinate frame. That frame might be defined such that one axis is inline with the spacecraft's velocity vector, but this is not a requirement, in general. Such a frame would be a local frame. One could easily define the spacecraft's attitude in an inertial frame (or relatively inertial) that had no relationship to the velocity vector.

    Pedantic, yes, but perhaps useful. Or not. :-)

  5. Reasons for putting it outside by rosbif73 · · Score: 5, Informative
    The reasons were explained recently by a NASA insider on sci.space.station:
    To minimize the number of penetrations through the pressure hull (both the power source and the load are outside, in this case), minimize the number of connections through hatches (lesson learned from Mir), and minimize potential crew exposure to ammonia (used to cool external power components).