Zebulon Scoville, the flight director of the American segment of the International Space Station (ISS), said that after the incident with the Russian multi-purpose laboratory module "Science", he was pleased with the safety of all the solar panels and panels of the ISS. He wrote about this on Thursday on his Twitter page on July 30.
As the specialist added, for the first time in his career, he announced an incident in space. Scoville admitted that he is proud of the employees of the mission control center in Houston.
On the eve of the Russian cosmonaut Oleg Novitsky on board the ISS told the specialists of the Mission Control Center near Moscow (MCC) about the engines of the Nauka module that were unplanned. They were later turned off.
Roscosmos commented on the incident, specifying that work on the transfer of "Science" from flight mode to the "docked with the ISS" mode continues.
To eliminate the loss of orientation of the ISS, it was necessary to turn on the engines of the Zvezda module and the Progress MS-17 cargo ship docked to the Poisk module. To date, the height of the station has been restored, "there is no danger for the crew," NASA noted.
According to the head of the ISS program at NASA, Joel Montalbano, Russia will lead the investigation of the situation with the Nauka module, engineers from the United States will also take part in it.
On July 21, the module was launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome on a Proton-M rocket and put into low-Earth orbit. On July 26, Russia undocked the Pirs module from the Zvezda module on the ISS to make room for Nauka.