Soyuz TMA-11 Landing

[ryan]

I think you will tell it drama, when the deceleration during landing is suddenly 10G instead of 4G and you landed somewhere in the wilderness without the rescue groups close.

The atmosphere just wanted to a little hello.

 

[Ghostrider]

And that's when you're suddenly glad you have that gun. Stay away from astro-cosmo-taikonauts 2nd Amendment rights, Oberg! You will have to pry them from our dead, cold, vacuum-preserved fingers!

 

[reverend]

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/24211848

Rescuers search for missing Russian spacecraft

U.S. astronaut among 3 on capsule which lands hundreds of miles off-course


BREAKING NEWS
MSNBC News Services
updated 7 minutes ago

MOSCOW - A Russian space capsule carrying an American astronaut landed hundreds of miles off-target Saturday, space officials said.
Search crews were tracing the Soyuz TMA-11 craft's homing beacon and were en route to the site in northern Kazakhstan by helicopter and truck, Mission Control spokesman Valery Lyndin said.

The crew —American astronaut Peggy Whitson, South Korean bioengineer Yi So-yeon and Russian flight engineer Yuri Malenchenko — were all safe, he said. However, all three had been subjected to severe G-forces during the re-entry.
"The capsule landed with an overshoot. Such things happen," he said. It landed about 20 minutes past its scheduled time.

The craft touched down around some 260 miles off target — a highly unusual distance given how precisely engineers plan for such landings, Lyndin said.

'Ballistic re-entry'
Officials said the craft may have followed a so-called "ballistic re-entry" — a very steep course that submits the crew to sometimes severe physical forces.

It's the second landing in a row of a Soyuz capsule that has gone awry.
Last October, a technical glitch sent a Soyuz spacecraft carrying Malaysia's first space traveler and two Russian cosmonauts on a steeper-than-normal path during their return to Earth.

Past problems
A similar problem occurred in May 2003 when the crew — Russian cosmonaut Nikolai Budarin and American astronauts Kenneth Bowersox and Donald Pettit — also experienced a steep, off-course landing.

It then took salvage crews several hours to locate the spacecraft because of communications problems.

Whitson and Malenchenko spent roughly six months performing experiments and maintaining the orbiting station.

Yi traveled to the station on April 10, along with cosmonauts Sergei Volkov and Oleg Kononenko, who replaced Whitson and Malenchenko. South Korea paid Russia $20 million for Yi's flight. She is the country's first astronaut.

American astronaut Garrett Reisman, who arrived last month on the U.S. space shuttle Endeavour, is also on board the station.

This is a breaking news story. Please check back for updates.

I don't understand why russian mission control wouldn't have been able to tell it's in the wrong trajectory after the deorbit burn, or if that was OK, did some onboard computer fail that allow this to happen?

This is troubling because as we near the end of the US space shuttle program, soyuz is the only means of transport to the station. It would really suck if for some reason the soyuz program was deemed faulty somehow and it too was canceled. Would they have to abandon the station?

 

[ryan]

Thats considered breaking news? breaking news is something like the pope has been shot or something not really a capsule has been found after an succsesful mission, well i guess it's kind of breaking news.

 

[BlueDragon8144]

well, if it's not normal, then it's breaking news. A ballistic entry is not normal.

 

[simonpro]

saying "breaking news" makes something exciting. even if it isn't really that big a deal anyway.

Unfortunately the media long since gave up on reporting what's important, and now only reports on what's exciting. A soyuz capsule with an offnominal descent is more exciting than a soyuz capsule with nominal descent. Hence it gets reported.
W.r.t the media the prhase "bottom feeding scum sucking bastards" springs to mind.

 

[BlueDragon8144]

haven't they always been like that?

 

[thomasantony]

What caused the capsule to go into ballistic entry?

~
Thomas

 

[reverend]

They just updated the story's 2nd line from
U.S. astronaut among 3 on capsule which lands hundreds of miles off-course
to
Report: U.S. astronaut safe after capsule lands hundreds of miles off-course

I guess they no longer care about the other 2... oh and the "breaking story" line was removed.

I guess media needs someone to die to make it an interesting space story.

 

[Notebook]

BBC News has woken up:-

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7355912.stm

N.

edit:-

Officials said the craft followed a so-called "ballistic re-entry" - a plunge with an uncontrollable, steep trajectory.

Up to their usual science reporting.

 

[YL3GDY]

According to that I've read, it's not extreme situation, as media want to present. It's regular, but not usual type of landing, which is planned. Rescue groups were ready for this scenario, but for crew it's VERY uncomfotable, and it's all.

Besides, they had an unique chance to feel like Gagarin - he was landing in spheric capsule with ~10G.

 

[BlueDragon8144]

probably worse, since they spent so much time in 0g

 

[Ghostrider]

W.r.t the media the prhase "bottom feeding scum sucking bastards" springs to mind.

Lower. The pus that infects the mucus that cruds up the fungus that feeds on the pond scum.

 

[Urwumpe]

What caused the capsule to go into ballistic entry?

Soyuz TMA starts its reentry program as lifting reentry, but this mode requires lots of hardware to work flawless: The RCS needs to work, it needs accelerometers and gyroscopes, the computer and it's software needs to work...

When there is a problem with the guidance and navigation hardware during initial reentry, or the crew did a wrong entry, the Soyuz TMA systems switch automatically into ballistic mode - this only needs the roll RCS thrusters and gyroscopes. The Soyuz gets spun up to a slow roll, so there is no lift at all (negative lift could be deadly when you have no control over it) and the capsule does not even aim for the landing site (which the normal software would do).

I think Gemini had the same logic for it's reentry, while Apollo was not able to do a ballistic reentry: At lunar speeds, you can't reenter ballistic.

And for the media guys out there, not reading a good forum: A ballistic reentry is still a controlled situation. It is not according to the flight plan, but the crew is not in danger. It is even much better as reentering with lift and possibly a wrong orientation of the capsule. (I think the reentry program switches to ballistic reentry when the G forces increase faster as expected - at least it would be one indication of a bad reentry)

The ballistic reentry is the Soyuz equivalent to you stabilizing your car on a suddenly frozen road. If you do it according to the manual, you drive much slower afterwards, but you arrive.

 

[simonpro]

The problem is likely related to the last flight. It also had a Ballistic reentry and that was found to be some problems with the cabling.
This Soyuz was launched before the last one landed, so it's conceivable that something similar has occured here.

 

[Urwumpe]

Ah OK, did not know the results of the investigation.

 

[Notebook]

BBC has updated the link I gave above with a different quote:-

The main thing is that the crew is alive and healthy," said Anatoly Perminov, head of the Russian federal space agency.

They underwent medical examinations after landing, having been subjected to G-forces up to 10 times those present on Earth.
Mr Perminov said the craft followed the back-up landing plan, a so-called "ballistic re-entry" - a plunge with an uncontrollable, steep trajectory. He said the crew missed the target because they changed their landing plan at the last minute without telling mission control.

I wonder if that last sentence is a mis-translation?

N.

 

[simonpro]

Assuming I can ever find the Russian source to that I'll translate it instead. The BBC couldn't translate something from English into, erm, English.

Anyway, I suspect it is a bit of a mistranslation. It's obvious that the mission plan changed, as they didn't land where they were supposed to. And it's obvoius mission control didn't hear about it: As they were looking in the wrong place come touchdown.

What is debatable is whether the crew changed it or whether it was automatic. Soyuz doesn't have much scope for crew interaction, so it's quite likely that the onboard software detected a problem and switched entry modes by itself.

Ah OK, did not know the results of the investigation.

It was badly fitted wiring. So it's not a fundamental flaw with the vehicle, just a flaw in the manufacturing process. As said, though, this mission had alreayd launched, so they had no way of checking if something similar occured.
I predict that it was another bad connection somewhere. But hell, if the BBC are to be trusted then maybe the crew just fancied something a bit more lively at entry interface.


(edit) Forgot my mandatory rant about the BBC's terrible science reporting (and they used to be so damned good!):
"G-forces up to 10 times those present on Earth."

"G-forceS" -- There's more than one g-force?
"plunge with an uncontrollable, steep trajectory" -- It's hardly uncontrollable. The entire descent was perfectly controlled. It was just steep and probably uncomfortable.
Also, why is everything "so called"? It sounds like they are accusing things of having the wrong name.

 

[Ghostrider]

The media love to use the term "so called" because it makes things look suspicious in the eyes of the public. Especially when they are things media heads know nothing about. If they don't know about it, it must be BAD. Cue calls to ban gravity.

 

[Andy44]

While I agree that the newsies are not the brightest, I for one am not ready to say that this is "no big deal". In the space business, this is a serious anomaly, and that fact that it's happened 3 times in recent years means it's not being handled properly. If this were an American unmanned system, there would be alot of investigation to stop it from happening again, so a manned system should get at least that level of respect from engineers and program managers. "It's no big deal" is usually the phrase often heard right before a very bad day.

This was a deviation from the flight plan at an extremely critical and risky portion of the mission, and it's only right for the press to treat it as the serious incident it is.

I think sometimes some of us are so concerned with bad press for spaceflight that we tend to pile on the press for reporting bad news, even when it's true.