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Coolant Glitch Forces Partial Space Station Shutdown
astroengine writes "A coolant system glitch on the International Space Station has forced several of the orbital outpost's modules offline as astronauts and ground control manage the problem. The crew are not in danger and ground control teams are currently working to see how best to troubleshoot. The issue, that occurred early on Wednesday, focuses on one of the space station's two external ammonia cooling loops, along which the station's electrical systems use to regulate their temperatures. The loop 'automatically shut down when it reached pre-set temperature limits,' said NASA in a statement. It is thought that a flow control valve in the ammonia pump itself may have malfunctioned."
Well...
It's not impossible. I used to bull's-eye womp rats in my t-16 back home. They're not much bigger than 2 meters.
So the Emperor needs to Force Lightning whoever forgot to weld a shield plate over that coolant vent.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
The ISS is on UTC, and "Early Wednesday" presumably means early in one of the US time zones, so I actually can't give you an exact answer anyway because "early" isn't an exact time in the first place.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
They should check for kid-friendly robots lurking about.
the coolant glitch is a result of a failed experiment in one of the science modules. If anyone watched NASA TV you could clearly hear the conversation up to the event. an astronaut can distinctly be overheard saying, "see, i told you it wont run Crysis"
Good people go to bed earlier.
in the ars article it mentions the coolant valves as one of 14 problems that come up regularly and are expected to be issues now and in the future.
or for a car analogy, even though you change your oil on a regular basis every once in a while you have to change the transmission oil too.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
Early means the first 8 hours of the day, so it happened between 0000 and 0800 UTC.
Mid UTC is 0800-1600
Late UTC is 1600-2400
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
always happens in winter.
As it happens, the US and Russians used pencils at first; but concluded that unpredictable addition of conductive graphite dust to the closed interiors of expensive, accident-prone aerospace hardware was a bad plan.
The Russians used grease pencils as a substitute for a while, since the binder keeps the pigment from floating around, and NASA took Fisher up on their offer to test some of their fancy new pressurized pens, which they eventually adopted (as did the Russians).