So it’s been a bumpy ride for some recently. The first south Korean astronaut was very nearly an ex-Korean astronaut on Saturday when the Soyuz earth return vehicle that she and fellow astronautess Peggy Whitson along with Russian cosmonaut Yuri Malenchenko narrowly avoided “lithobraking” (slowing down only when you leave a smoking crater in the ground).
The (slightly pale looking) Korean Astonaut, Yi So-Yeon, told a press conference in Russia’s Star City today: “During the descent there was some kind of fire outside the Soyuz capsule because we were going through the atmosphee. At first I was scared, but the two other guys looked okay, so I tried to look okay, too.”
The soyuz landed nearly 300 miles off course and 20 mins late due to a systems failure on board. The failure meant that the capsule returned to earth on a ballistic trajectory, rather than its normal computer controlled descent. (The word ballistic means to fall under the power of gravity) The difference between the two types of landing are 2-3 Gs Max for a normal descent compared with about 8-10Gs for a Ballistic entry.
Just to round off a bad day, the retro rockets that fire moments before touch down to slow the capsule right down for a soft landing also failed. Good job the parachutes were working. Apparently this isn’t the first time it’s happened it’s quite a common occurrence for the good old Soyuz (old being the emphasised word there). Apparently there are backup computer systems on board, one of which, I shit ye not, is noted down in the Soyuz flight manual as your brain. The amazing thing is that the Soyuz is actually built to withstand these types of landing, even without the retro rockets.
It’s a classic Soviet design philosophy: when quality and precision are unavailable, substitute brute strength.
Russian take on it – http://www.kommersant.com/p884947/Soyuz_TMA/
BBC news story – http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7355912.stm
You may remember that ESA recently launched it’s new Space Truck, the ATV, AKA Joules Verne. It’s now docked to the ISS. What they were keeping quite is (I don’t know why, possibly not to worry the Americans or Russians) is that it and it’s Ariane-V is now human-flight rated.
By far the most exciting thing on the space geek radar is the landing of the Mars Phoenix Lander Mission which is due to land (fingers crossed) in 34 days, 8 hours and 48 minutes from now (not that I’m counting or anything). It’s a stationary lander like the old Viking probes (rather than golf buggy like rovers, spirit and opportunity). It’s landing in the polar regions with the primary goals of looking for water ice and microbial life. Rather alarmingly, they are ditching the whole bouncing airbag landing thing that spirit and opportunity used (and worked so perfectly) in favour of retro rockets and luck of the gods. Lets just hope they didn’t buy the retros from the same dodgy supplier that the Russians did for Soyuz. If they did, I guess there is always a backup plan of “regolithobraking” hahahaha (sorry – bad geology geek joke)
Nasa (JPL) mission home page – http://phoenix.lpl.arizona.edu/mission.php
