Travis and Michelle Fitzgerald's blog

As you all know, STS-117/13A is docked to the International Space Station right now, in the midst of an upgrade to the power generation and storage systems. The construction part of the mission is going well, but there have been other, serious, problems onboard.

Just after the new truss (with the new solar arrays still "in the box") was installed, the Russian computer system had a catastrophic failure. 6 different computers failed within 24 hours of each other. The result is that there are no computers on the Russian side of the ISS to control any of the major systems. The biggest concerns are a loss of the ability of the Russian side to generate oxygen (from water), remove carbon dioxide, and fire thrusters to assist the gyroscopes with the orientation of the 270 ton vehicle.

The last impact is the one that my group has been assisting our flight controller counterparts (with the callsign ADCO - Attitude Determination and Control Officer) with for the past week. The flight controllers have developed some innovative ways to maintain attitude control without needing to fire the Russian thrusters (which is necessary since they couldn't fire if we wanted them to).

Michelle, meanwhile, has been working feverishly with her group to assist with the troubleshooting of the Russian computer problem. They have been working with the crew to diagnose different potential causes of the failure. All this while she's been working 8 pm to 5 am every day (and will until Atlantis lands). She's a trooper!

At the same time, our Russian counterparts have been working to get the failed computers back. They have already moved up the launch of the next Russian cargo vehicle from August to late July, and have added new spare parts to that vehicle.

The crew has been working hard to fix the problem. In fact, the 2 Russians onboard, Oleg and Fyodor, have been asked to take naps whenever they can so that they can stay up to work on the computers every couple of hours (when somebody comes up with a new idea). Luckily, today they made some progress. They were able to get 2 out of 3 of each of the 2 types of computers up and running before I left work today. The Russian flight controllers will watch them overnight, and then start configuring them in the morning. Hopefully they'll be back to minimal operations by the time the Shuttle leaves on Monday or Tuesday. If so, we should be able to limp along until the new computers arrive next month.

There is still hope, after all. You'll here more when we've undocked and Michelle can take a break. We're hoping to take a couple of days off once the Shuttle lands (although I'm not sure if that's possible).

-Travis