Padły zdaje się dwa z trzech - jeśli rzeczywiście, to jest to tragiczny wynik, nawet jeśli mają jakieś zapasowe. Ale zdaje się, że podczas starów pierwszych załogowych Dragonów też były jakieś kłopoty z silniczkami manewrowymi?
Czy ktoś wie, do jakich manewrów te silniczki są niezbędne? Do cumowania, do zejścia z orbity i lądowania, lub/i czy do czegoś innego?
Mission control in Houston just informed astronaut Bob Hines on the International Space that the ISS Mission Management Team polled "go" for rendezvous of the Starliner spacecraft with the station later today.
Engineers overnight analyzed the failure of two thrusters during the orbit insertion burn. The Starliner’s orbital maneuvering and attitude control, or OMAC, jets were used for the injection burn, and will be fired again for several rendezvous burns to fine-tune the craft’s approach to the International Space Station.
“We had two thrusters fail,” said Mark Nappi, Boeing’s Starliner program manager. “The first one had fired. It fired for a second and then it shut down. The flight control system did what it was supposed to and it turned it over to the second thruster. It fired for about 25 seconds and then it shut down.
“Again, the flight control system took over, did what it was supposed to, and and went to third thruster and we had a successful orbital insertion,” Nappi said.
The Starliner spacecraft remained on course to dock at the space station around 7:10 p.m. EDT (2310 GMT) Friday, but officials said engineers will analyze the thruster issue overnight before a management meeting Friday morning to decide on whether to proceed with the approach to the station.
Steve Stich, NASA’s commercial crew program manager, said the spacecraft has “plenty of redundancy” to complete the test flight without the failed thrusters. The thrusters that shut off during the orbit insertion burn are located in one of four doghouse-shaped propulsion pods on the Starliner service module.
Each “doghouse” has three aft-facing OMAC engines, for a total of 12. There are eight additional OMAC engines positioned in other areas of the spacecraft. Each OMAC thruster generates about 1,500 pounds of thrust, and are used in conjunction with lower-thrust reaction control system thrusters to maneuver the Starliner spacecraft in orbit.
The OMAC engines completed another orbit phasing burn Thursday night, and will be used again for approach maneuvers closer to the space station Friday. The capsule’s final approach will be controlled by the smaller reaction control system jets, then the OMAC engines will fire again at the end of the mission for the deorbit burn to set up the Starliner for re-entry and landing.
Despite the thruster problem, NASA and Boeing officials were pleased with the start to the Starliner’s unpiloted demonstration mission, known as Orbital Flight Test-2. Officials also a sublimator, part of the Starliner’s cooling system, was “sluggish” during the launch, but its performance improved once the spacecraft arrived in space.
Wątek: Orbital Flight Test 2 - Starliner Spacecraft 2 (19/20.05.2022 o 22:54 UTC) (Przeczytany 26802 razy)