Coolant Glitch Forces Partial Space Station Shutdown 49
astroengine writes "A coolant system glitch on the International Space Station has forced several of the orbital outpost's modules offline as astronauts and ground control manage the problem. The crew are not in danger and ground control teams are currently working to see how best to troubleshoot. The issue, that occurred early on Wednesday, focuses on one of the space station's two external ammonia cooling loops, along which the station's electrical systems use to regulate their temperatures. The loop 'automatically shut down when it reached pre-set temperature limits,' said NASA in a statement. It is thought that a flow control valve in the ammonia pump itself may have malfunctioned."
What do this have to do with X? (Score:1)
^ First reaction.
Posting as AC because moderators got no humor. (Or maybe my humor is of little value for the readers.)
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Well...
It's not impossible. I used to bull's-eye womp rats in my t-16 back home. They're not much bigger than 2 meters.
So the Emperor needs to Force Lightning whoever forgot to weld a shield plate over that coolant vent.
Translations Needed (Score:2)
Just so we know, what are the Russian and Japanese translations of "This is *NOT* cool, man!!!!1"
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Yes, "space stuff", like find and fix the common issues that will eventually crop up in a long-term flight or colonization project. Both Mir and the Shuttle ran into similar issues, so obviously one of the things they need to do before attempting to actually live further out than NEO is create a better cooling system. Not as flashy as building a new booster, but every bit as important.
Early on Wednesday (Score:1)
occurred early on Wednesday
With a 90 minute orbit, when exactly is that on ISS?
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The ISS is on UTC, and "Early Wednesday" presumably means early in one of the US time zones, so I actually can't give you an exact answer anyway because "early" isn't an exact time in the first place.
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Early means the first 8 hours of the day, so it happened between 0000 and 0800 UTC.
Mid UTC is 0800-1600
Late UTC is 1600-2400
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You're assuming the NASA release was written with reference to ISS time; I'm not sure that's the case given that news releases are normally intended for the press.
Jinx put Max in space (Score:3)
Comment removed (Score:5, Funny)
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Yes. [moonbuggy.org] The electronics getting hot and shutting off will, for no apparent reason, expend significant amounts of delta-v, deorbiting the station.
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I am very, very sorry to report that your link appears to be broken. Was hoping for suitably entertaining image.
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Ah, it was one of those "ecard" line drawings of a child on a stool with a dunce cap. It was captioned "There are stupid questions."
Re:Meanwhile... (Score:5, Informative)
The Russians used grease pencils as a substitute for a while, since the binder keeps the pigment from floating around, and NASA took Fisher up on their offer to test some of their fancy new pressurized pens, which they eventually adopted (as did the Russians).
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The research and development of which Fisher had done on their own initiative and their own dime.
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Yeah, pretty much.
But is there some reason we can't use "SCOTUS" as an abbreviation? "Supremes" makes me think of either the 60s musical group, or some sort of Japanese mecha robot team a la Supreme Ultra Mega Iron Defenders of Earth.
If memory serves (Score:2)
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in the ars article it mentions the coolant valves as one of 14 problems that come up regularly and are expected to be issues now and in the future.
or for a car analogy, even though you change your oil on a regular basis every once in a while you have to change the transmission oil too.
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How to dissipate heat in a near-vacuum sounds like an interesting engineering problem.
http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2001/ast21mar_1/ [nasa.gov]
I managed to stay with them right up to the point where they said they radiated the excess heat into space...I thought that this entire setup hinged on the idea that vacuum doesn't conduct heat? Or is it like diffusion where heat wants to spread evenly, only in this case the diffused-to location is near absolute zero?
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Right, there is no conduction because there there is no air/water/dirt to conduct the heat away. Instead they have to radiate the heat away into space, a process which is much less efficient. The cooling system panels glow in the infrared like crazy.
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Since it is so routine, I would think they would want to do it in a more preventative manner instead of waiting until critical systems have to be rerouted or shut down.
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Where is Geordie? (Score:2)
Isn't a coolant leak, the reason to evacuate the engineering bay in ST:TNG?
It is almost like they didn't want the engineers to come up with a plot resolving fix, just yet.
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Is there a feminine voice counting down the seconds to meltdown, yet?
Can't be fixed until 00:00:01
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AFAIK the coolants that would be used in that setting would be highly radioactive and/or toxic or extraordinarily hot - think "primary loop" reactor coolant. What the ISS is having problems with is more like the water cooling stuff in your car or PC (if you've a water-cooled CPU/GPU)
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Companies seem to have a tendency to use extremely toxic chemicals wherever they don't expect humans to need to access the internals of the system...some nonsense about nature being inconvenient... :)
Thermostat is stuck open (Score:3)
Get out the lasers! (Score:2)
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I'm surprised they didn't have some kind of coolant media they could vent across exchangers to dump heat - you wouldn't need to carry very much, and you (generally...) only launch once on a mission.
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Space is very cold but it's also an almost-perfect vacuum, so like the coffee I put in my thermos five hours ago, hot objects can't cool easily. Objects making their own heat such as space stations and astronauts can be at a quite serious risk of overheating, especially if they're also being warmed by the sun.
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Ammonia was one of the first coolants used more commonly in food industry, my brother has been wanting to get an air conditioner for his home that uses ammonia refrigerant but they are mostly commercial.