A power outage at NASA headquarters in Houston has temporarily disrupted communications with the International Space Station.

For the first time since the ISS became fully operational in 2009, the space agency had to rely on backup control systems to re-establish contact with astronauts hundreds of kilometres above the Earth's surface.

The outage occurred on Tuesday 25 July and lasted about 90 minutes before normal communications could resume. Meanwhile, NASA communicated with astronauts Frank Rubio, Woody Hoburg and Stephen Bowen using Russian communications systems.

The Expedition 69 crew includes Roscosmos cosmonauts Dmitri Petelin, Andrey Fedyaev and Commander Sergey Prokopyev, and UAE astronaut Sultan Alneyadi.

"It was not a problem with the aircraft. It was purely a ground problem," NASA's space station programme manager Joel Montalbano told reporters during a press conference. "At no time was the crew or the vehicle in danger."

The outage, in which telemetry, voice communications and the command system were lost, was a result of planned upgrades to the building's ground power system at the Johnson Space Centre, but the outage itself was not expected. However, within 20 minutes of the power outage, NASA's mission control centre established contact with the space station via Russian systems, and the backup control centre a few miles away also came online shortly afterwards.

"We knew this work would be ongoing, and in preparation for that, we have a backup command and control system that we will use if we have to close the centre due to a weather emergency - especially important during hurricane season," Montalbano said.

"This hardware was ready to go. In about 90 minutes, we were up and running with full command, telemetry and voice to the International Space Station."

The problem has since been resolved and mission control is once again fully operational. NASA plans to investigate the incident to ensure it does not recur in the remaining years before the ISS's planned de-orbit in 2031.

 

Source: https://www.sciencealert.com/