Soyuz spacecraft safely delivers Russian-American crew to ISS

[old steel]

A Soyuz space capsule has successfully docked with the International Space Station (ISS), delivering its Russian and American crew. The docking had been delayed by two days due to a technical mishap.
http://www.dw.de/image/0,,17520092_303,00.jpg (http://www.dw.de/soyuz-spacecraft-safely-delivers-russian-american-crew-to-iss/a-17526956#)
The Soyuz TMA-12M spacecraft finally docked with the ISS on Thursday, two days after a maneuvering thruster had failed to kick into gear as planned, forcing the capsule to orbit the Earth until the next docking opportunity.
The arrival of Russian cosmonauts Alexander Skvortsov and Oleg Artemyev and NASA astronaut Steven Swanson (pictured above) brings the ISS to its full capacity of six people. They replaced three crewmen who returned to Earth this month (http://www.dw.de/astronaut-trio-safely-returns-to-earth-despite-bad-weather/a-17486809).
The three-man crew relief had blasted off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on Tuesday, and they were supposed to reach the ISS six hours later. But two hours after launch, the Soyuz capsule failed to fire one of its thrusters.
The spacecraft had to orbit the Earth 34 times until it could finally dock with the ISS. According to NASA, the Soyuz capsule was “unable to complete its third thruster burn to fine tune its approach” to the space station.
Mathematical problem?
It's unclear what caused the thruster to fail. But the head of the Russian state rocket firm Energia, which supplies the Soyuz's thrusters, said that a mathematical miscalculation was probably responsible for the mishap.
"It could be mathematics, it could be a transmitter problem or that the engine choked," said Vitaly Lopota on Wednesday, according to the Interfax news agency. "But most likely it was a mathematical problem."
NASA mission commentator Rob Navias said that the cause of the thruster failure was still under investigation. But preliminary analysis indicated that the spacecraft was one degree out of alignment with its planned course, he said. That could have caused the Soyuz's computers to automatically abort the thruster burn.

http://www.dw.de/soyuz-spacecraft-safely-delivers-russian-american-crew-to-iss/a-17526956 ;)

[Glass]

I wonder if they tried this to fix the problem?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QAetxONX1Do

works for me. Nothing worse than trying to fire those retros and the key is stuck.

[keehah]

arstechnica.com: Russian module suddenly fires thrusters after docking with space station (https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/07/russian-module-suddenly-fires-thrusters-after-docking-with-space-station/)

7/29/2021
The Russian "Nauka" module linked to the space station at [July 29] 8:30 am CT (13:30 UTC) , local time in Houston, where NASA's Mission Control is based. After that, Russian cosmonauts aboard the station began preparing to open the hatches leading to Nauka, but at 11:34 am Houston time, Nauka unexpectedly started to fire its movement thrusters.

Within minutes, the space station began to lose attitude control...

Attitude control was fully lost at 11:42 am, and engines on the space station's service module were fired. This was followed by a handover to the Russian Progress vehicle attached to the station, which began to fire its thrusters. This tug-of-war offset the Nauka module thruster activity, which eventually stopped after fuel supplies were exhausted. By 12:29 pm on Thursday, attitude control was restored. It made for quite an hour on the ground and in space.

"Yeehaw!" tweeted Zebulon Scoville, lead flight director in Houston during Thursday's space station activities, after his shift ended...

Meanwhile, the Russians will continue to work toward integrating Nauka with the space station. This is a sizable module that includes crew quarters, an airlock for scientific experiments, and much more. With a mass of about 24 metric tons, it is roughly 20 percent larger than the biggest Russian segment of the station, the Zvezda service module.

Nauka has had a long and, so far, inglorious history. Its launch eight days ago came after more than a decade of delays due to lack of funds and technical problems. Shortly after reaching orbit, Russia had difficulties with Nauka's main propulsion system, and docking with the space station was delayed. After using backup thrusters to raise its altitude and reach the station, Nauka docked. It's not clear what role the propulsion system issues experienced shortly after the launch may have played in Thursday's difficulties.