Rocky Landing for Soyuz Space Capsule Investigated
The Soyuz space capsule had a rocky trip home over the weekend, but NASA is confident that the Russians have a firm handle on things.
This was the second straight off-course landing for a Soyuz capsule returning from the international space station. Russian space officials first thought that the crew of three””Including American Peggy Whitson””was in serious danger during the descent.
But William H. Gerstenmaier, NASA associate administrator for space operations, downplayed such alarm. Gerstenmaier said NASA wasn’t aware of any danger for the crew although it didn’t ask if the crew was at risk.
"I don’t see this as a major problem," Gerstenmaier said about the landing. "But it’s clearly something that should not have occurred."
The jarring landing happened on Saturday after the capsule went into an unplanned ballistic re-entry.
“The Russians thought they had solved the descent problem after it cropped up last October and NASA agreed with their original analysis that a frayed wire was to blame,” Gerstenmaier said.
However, he said the original investigation must have gone wrong since the ship that landed on Saturday was inspected in orbit and didn’t have frayed wiring.
"We may have missed the probable cause," he said.
However, NASA is satisfied with the way Russia is handling the mishap and hasn’t asked to be part of the investigation.
"I have complete confidence in what the Russians are doing. They were very concerned about this," he said. "They treated this with the same diligence as we would in the United States."
NASA officials do, however, expect to be thoroughly questioned about the incident on Thursday when they testify at the International Space Station.
"I’m obviously concerned anytime a human space flight mission doesn’t go as planned. We need to get more information about what happened and why, as well as what will be done to keep it from happening again," said House Science Committee Chairman Bart Gordon, D-Tenn.
Russian space officials denied a newspaper report saying the three crew returning from the International Space Station came close to death during Saturday’s re-entry.
Gerstenmaier monitored the landing at Moscow Mission Control and was able to relay some of the problem when the Soyuz landed 300 miles off-course in Kazakhstan. A half-hour after the landing, Soyuz flight engineer Yuri Malenchenko called Moscow on a satellite phone to say they were OK. But he said no one was worried because it often takes an entire hour for this to occur.
The previous landing of a Soyuz spacecraft in October, which brought Malaysia’s first astronaut Sheikh Muszaphar Shukor back from space, was also not without problems. The space capsule veered some 120 miles off course after a computer glitch.
Gerstenmaier noted that Malenchenko detected some smoke in the cabin, but NASA officials say it was possible that it wasn’t smoke, but the smell of burning materials, which is not uncommon.
The capsule crew experienced gravity forces of about eight times Earth’s gravity for up to two minutes””normal Soyuz returns have a G-force of about five.
They were subjected to "a kind of general jostling in their seats that they have not felt before," Gerstenmaier said.
A space industry source, said the crew could have been burnt alive in the latest incident because the capsule entered the atmosphere at the wrong angle.
“It is common for a Soyuz hatch and antenna to have heat damage during re-entry. Investigators classified it as three on a five-point scale,” said Alexander Vorobyov, a spokesman for the Russian Federal Space Agency.
A second Russian space source at the landing site said the capsule looked more charred than usual because its engines were fired to soften the landing, igniting the dry grass in Kazakhstan’s steppe.
South Korea’s first astronaut, Yi So-yeon, the third member of the crew, said during a news conference that she was frightened during the descent. "At first I was really scared because it looked really, really hot and I thought we could burn."
Soyuz Ships serve as the emergency escape ship for the international space station and will be NASA’s only mode of space transport for several years after the 2010 scheduled retirement of the space shuttle fleet. NASA officials say the ships have been consistently reliable.
"We need not to overreact to this," Gerstenmaier said.
Soyuz and Progress spacecraft, derived from the Cold War-era R-7 intercontinental ballistic missile, have been launched more than 1,700 times, demonstrating 97 percent reliability.
Soviet cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov died in 1967 after the strings of the parachute meant to slow the descent of his Soyuz-1 tangled and the spacecraft hurtled to the ground.
In June 1971, the Soviet space crew of Georgy Dobrovolsky, Vladislav Volkov and Viktor Patsayev died from decompression as they were returning from space aboard another Soyuz capsule.
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Image Caption: NASA astronaut Peggy Whitson (foreground), Expedition 16 commander; South Korean spaceflight participant So-yeon Yi and Russian Federal Space Agency cosmonaut Yuri Malenchenko, flight engineer and Soyuz commander, exit the airplane at Chkalovsky airport, Star City. Whitson, Malenchenko and Yi landed their Soyuz TMA-11 spacecraft on April 19, 2008 in central Kazakhstan to complete 192 days in space for Whitson and Malenchenko and 11 days in orbit for Yi. Photo Credit: NASA/Bill Ingalls
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