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Russians Debate Cause of Computer Glitch JIM
SCIUTTO While NASA said it is continuing to determine the cause of and repair a massive computer failure on the International Space Station, Russian sources have told ABC News that they believe the computer system will need to be replaced. "It appears that at least the power source is not the cause of the anomaly," said NASA's Space Station manager, Mike Suffredini, at a press conference today. "We'll continue to look." Instead, Suffredini said, they believe that the issue is a hardware failure and that they are working with the Russians to fix the computers. "There is nobody in this agency or in the Russian agency that thinks this vehicle is at risk of being lost," Suffredini told reporters.
Meanwhile, a high-level source in the Russian space agency told ABC News that the fix will require not just sendinga new power supply, but a whole new set of computers. The source explained that the power supply and computer itself cannot be separated. Russians have moved up the launch of a Progress cargo ship, scheduled for Aug. 8. It will instead be sent up on July 23, carrying new computers to replace the ones that failed. NASA engineers kept looking for the original cause of the problem, and came up dry. They measured the power coming from the new solar panels installed this week by Atlantis' spacewalkers, and it appeared normal. They shut that power down. It did not help the Russian computers. "We work problems like this all the time," said Suffredini. "When you have two countries with a lot of experience working together, it's amazing what you can do." "There is nobody who thinks this vehicle is at risk of being lost -- not remotely," he continued. The Russian source tells ABCNews that the Americans and Russians are working "very well" together. "The Americans are really helping. Whenever a problem arises the Americans give them answers," he said. After the initial computer failure, it was actually American gyroscopes that saved the station from worse trouble, he said. For the next step, in the early hours of the morning, the Russians will try to localize the computer problem by excluding the part that deals with orientation to see if that helps. Meanwhile, they will rely on those American gyroscopes to steady the space station.
"The crew is not at risk," he said. "If anything happens on board, we are prepared." Suffredini said that the crew would continue to work to determine the problem with the computer over the next few days and remained optimistic that these challenges wouldn't sideline the mission at hand or the future of space exploration all together. "Space flight is a challenging business. We can do nothing and go home or we can go out and explore," he said. "We choose to explore and these are the things that you occasionally deal with in this business."
The president and vice president of the state-owned Energia Space Rocket Corp., which operates the flight, told ABC News while they are still trying to fix the failure from the ground, they now believe they will have to send up a completely new power supply for the computer system. This would have to wait till August when they'd send a Russian rocket up. The officials say they will have the cosmonauts stay onboard in the meantime to keep things running. While the failure means the Russians have no flight control, they believe that the U.S. portion of the station can control the station's flight in the meantime. They say they're working on a plan with the Americans for this now. In the simplest terms, they have no orientation control now and are reliant on the Americans to "drive" the station. A surge from the deployment of the solar array performed by U.S. shuttle astronauts this week is still the most likely explanation for the failure, the Russian space officials say. They also say it could simply be something "in nature" they've never seen before or a side effect well beyond the level that's shown up in tests. Watch the full story tonight on "World News with Charles Gibson" at 6:30 EDT and "Nightline" at 11:35 EDT On the positive side, the Russian space agency says that the station could fly for a few months without correcting its flight, meaning that even if the astronauts were forced to leave, there may be more time to fix the computer problems down the road. Meanwhile, shuttle astronauts James Reilly and Danny Olivas from the Space Shuttle Atlantis plan to take a spacewalk this afternoon to repair a tear in the shuttle's thermal blanket using a surgical staple. Part of the blanket peeled back during the launch. The Atlantis shuttle crew only has enough fuel to remain docked to the space station until Wednesday. "Things are not always going to go well. Fortunately we have a great operations team down in Mission Control and at the Johnson Space Center and over in Moscow & that are working together to decide what the best course of action is," said Atlantis Cmdr. Frederick Sturckow.
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