Smoke Aarm on ISS! False alarm?

Not many details really but a smoke alarm was sounded on the ISS.
Must be a tad nerve wrecking at the least. There was no smell of smoke and has been concluded a false alarm.
Still might be something to keep an eye on.
Or not.

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reply to post by pazcat


This video is from 2007. There was a more recent smoke alarm: stargazerslounge.com...

NASA Mission Control in Moscow and Houston declared a "false alarm." In the past dust particles have caused such false smoke alarms.

reply to post by wildespace


Oops, so much for powers of obseravation,
I'll get rid of that.
Maybe a new vid will suface soon.

Wasn't there an actual fire at one point? Or was that on Mir ?

Originally posted by phishyblankwaters
Wasn't there an actual fire at one point? Or was that on Mir ?

Yes there was, in February of 1997. There were six people on the station when the fire happened. What's scary is that the fire was blocking the path to one of the two Soyuz escape capsules, so if the did need to escapes, only 3 of the 6 would be able to do so. Here's a video describing the fire (the events leading to fire start at about the 1:20 mark):


Just four months later, in June 1997, an unmanned progress supply ship trying to dock with Mir collided with it instead. The collision did major damage, much of which was never repaired. On of the modules on Mir -- the Spektr module -- was punctured and needed to be permanently sealed off.

Mir-Progress Collision

,..and a video describing the collision:

reply to post by Soylent Green Is People

I just realized my post above might have been misleading when I said "Yes -- there was [a fire]".
To clarify, and to answer the original question directly, that fire was on MIR.

It think the rest of my post clarified that point, but my first sentence was still potentially misleading.

A fire in a sealed microgravity oxygen atmosphere over 200 miles above land must be the most terrifying scenario possible. One would have no chance of surviving such an event. What could possibly stop the fire before your life support expires?

I'm a layman on this, and not trying to throw raspberries at grandma from behind the couch.

reply to post by Illustronic

After the Apollo 1 fire tragedy, NASA (and the Russians) got away from having a pure oxygen environment. The ISS instead uses a mixture of gases similar to the Earth's atmosphere, which is much safer in case of a fire. MIR used a similar atmosphere.

As for what do you do if the fire burns out of control? I suppose there is a protocol for when it is evident that the crew must "abandon ship" and use the emergency escape capsules/"lifeboats". Both the ISS and MIR have/had permanently docked Soyuz capsules that could ferry the astronauts back to Earth (or at least away from the station) in times of dire need. Each Soyuz could hold three astronauts, so there needs to be multiple Soyuz capsules if there are more than three station crew members. In fact, the size of the crew is limited by the number of Soyuz capsules docked to the station. When the space shuttle is docked, it is considered to be one of the escape "lifeboats", and can carry the astronauts that with it back to safety.

The interesting/scary thing about the MIR fire is that there were six crew members, but the fire was blocking to only route to one of the two docked Soyuz lifeboats/escape capsules. That means that if they DID have to abandon ship, only three could have done so, while the other three would be trapped -- and would probably die if they couldn't put out the fire.


Another interesting side note -- because of the Columbia disaster, NASA now requires an "escape plan" for the astronauts in the space shuttle. If the shuttle was launched into orbit, but was found to have damage similar to Clumbia that would prohibit it from making a safe re-entry and return to Earth, the astronauts could use the ISS as a temporary lifeboat until another shuttle could be made ready to come and retrieve them -- which could take weeks, or even months.

However, in 2009 when the shuttle was doing the Hubble Telescope repair mission, there would have been no way for the shuttle to reach the space station if the shuttle was found to be damaged beyond repair. Hubble is at a much higher altitude than the ISS, so flying from Hubble to the ISS is impossible. Therefore, NASA needed to have a second shuttle all ready to go, sitting on a launch pad, just in case it had to rescue the astronauts in the other shuttle doing the Hubble repair.

Two Shuttles on Launch Pads