International Space Station drifting out of orbit.

From Sky News:
Computers on board the International Space Station have malfunctioned - forcing the shuttle Atlantis to fire thrusters to help keep it in orbit.

Full article here

In a worst-case scenario, if at least one of the computers was not operating after the shuttle left, the space station's three crew members could return to Earth, he said.

"We always have an option to depart," Mr Suffredini said.

And then what?..........................

Just let the orbit decay and have it plummet to earth! I hope not.

The problem seems to be Russian computers. Sounds like a scene from "Red Planet"

Lets hope this gets sorted out quickly.

Update,

Full CNN article here

Seems they've restored partial control to one of the computers but are still at a loss as to why it happened?

The "reboot" caused a "fire alarm" to go off and the problems are said to be "power" related rather than "computer" related.

So good to know they have everything under control (slight sarcasm).

I wonder if this is leading to some un-fixable major malfunction that will see the end of the whole, very expensive project.

Is this the beginning of a "we need a new space station" conspiracy?

Money, money, money.

Originally posted by nerbot
The problem seems to be Russian computers. Sounds like a scene from "Red Planet"

More like Space Cowboys in reverse (watched it on telly last night)

Clint Eastwoods computer got abord a russian 'communications' satalite, and that one goes wrong, when they get up there to fix it they discover its really a nuke weapons platform!

Well not exactly like that - but i did like the highly improbable ending where one of the crew (Jack Neilson I think) straps his space suit to the 6 missiles, points them towards the moon and lets em rip

The final bit shows the wreakage on the moon, FOOTSTEPS from the wreakage to the space to Jack laying back looking back at earth!!

I love Hollywood

From Armageddon,

"American components... Russian components... ALL MADE IN TAIWAN!!"

It would've been utterly ironic if the crash happened when that MS dude was up there.

NASA says that the computers that control parts of the International Space Station are nearly back to normal, after a major system failure.

The Russian computers operate the station's oxygen and water supplies and its orientation. Scientists aren't sure what went wrong. They said they have never seen that type of failure before.

While the computers were out, the ISS was completely reliant on Atlantis for major steering changes it needed to make to keep the solar arrays pointed at the sun for power.

Russian scientists worked on the problem overnight and have re-established some communication with the computers. They are still doing "clean up" work to get the rest of the system up and running.

NASA says Russian engineers are looking into what caused the failure. They think the problem was electrical, rather than a glitch in the software.

www.cfnews13.com...

Looks like the new solar array might be to blame, but it's almost fixed. They have 6 redundant computers, and four of them have been restored to operation. They're working on getting the other two back up. Atlantis has had the mission extended to 13 days to repair a torn thermal blanket.

ETA: The station wasn't "drifting out of orbit". They were firing thrusters to turn the station to maintain orientation to the sun, so they could keep power supplied to the solar arrays. They have to rotate as they orbit to keep the sun shining on the arrays and keep batteries charging.

[edit on 6/14/2007 by Zaphod58]

funny that this happened while the shuttle was there..and had just set up a 'new' solar array..if that was the reason for the failure, why can't america just admit it...'oops, we made a mistake but have helped fix it....'
takes away alot of the conspiracy side.

that seems to be a thing with americans..they can never admit that they were wrong or even hint that they may have been in error...had to respect countries or people that never admit their fault.........

seems ..'funny' that americians were there when this happened.....

And what about the Russians? They have almost never admitted when THEY make mistakes either. In fact they almost immediately started pointing the finger at the US when this happened. Despite their record with computers on Mir, and all the problems Mir had through the years.

Originally posted by apc
From Armageddon,

"American components... Russian components... ALL MADE IN TAIWAN!!"

It would've been utterly ironic if the crash happened when that MS dude was up there.

A Microsoft employee is an austronaut? Sweet, I had no idea^^ It's not like I'm saying that it's improbable, since Microsoft practically represents the word computer. But it's cool that he's working for Microsoft, and also getting to go to space!

[edit on 17-6-2007 by ZikhaN]