Hard landing

The ISS crew landed with overloads

On Saturday, the crew of the 16th ISS Expedition returned to Earth from a space mission. However, their return turned out to be difficult: the Soyuz TMA-11 descent module, which carried Russian Yuri Malenchenko, American Peggy Whitson and the first South Korean cosmonaut Lee So Yeon, landed in an off-design area, deviating 420 km from the planned point. This happened due to the fact that the descent spacecraft left orbit along a ballistic trajectory, which, in addition to leaving the expected return schedule, is also fraught with the maximum possible overloads for the crew. However, Roscosmos says that the descent “took place as usual, and nothing special happened.” “The most important thing is that the crew is alive and well. The landing took place normally, but according to the backup option. The descent was along a ballistic trajectory. The specific reasons will be known after the descent module is delivered to RSC Energia,” RIA Novosti quotes the words of the head of the space agency, Anatoly Perminov.

At the same time, until the landing of the descent vehicle, the Russian Mission Control Center did not know that the descent was taking place along a ballistic trajectory. As Anatoly Perminov said, the search and rescue aircraft, which was flying the Soyuz TMA-11, reported too late that it had deviated from the planned course. However, first of all, the astronauts themselves had to report the changed trajectory, but for unknown reasons they did not do this. “The crew, when they were in the descent module, did not provide information about the ballistic descent during a communication session with the operational group,” said Anatoly Perminov. The Vremya Novostey control center also confirmed that the “hitch” occurred due to the fact that the cosmonauts did not transmit information about the deviation from the course to Earth in time. “For some reason there was no report from the astronauts about this. At a certain altitude, the descent vehicle passes through an ionized cloud, which might not have missed the signal,” said the source of our newspaper.

Due to the fact that the descent took place along a ballistic trajectory, i.e. without the intervention of the automation that orients the descent vehicle, the Soyuz TMA-11, in which the cosmonauts were returning, not only deviated from the intended landing point by 420 kilometers, but was also “late” relative to the estimated time. However, the search operation, which involved 12 helicopters, three airplanes and six Rosaeronavigatsiya evacuation and rescue vehicles, did not last long: the descent module was quickly discovered and three cosmonauts were immediately taken to Baikonur, where they were carefully examined by doctors, who suffered no serious injuries. no astronauts were found.

As the MCC said, when descending along a ballistic trajectory, the astronauts experience significant overloads. If with a normal descent they are approximately four units, then with a ballistic one they are twice as much - eight to nine. “Everything is fine with them, they are all young and healthy, especially since they are undergoing special training,” Roscosmos press secretary Alexander Vorobyov told Vremya Novostey. Mr. Vorobyov, like his boss Mr. Perminov, also assures that nothing bad happened to the cosmonauts: ballistic descent is considered standard, but “simply less desirable” for landing. However, the special commission still has to find out what ultimately led to the “less desirable” option. “A special commission has been created that will study this issue and find out what the problem was,” explained Alexander Vorobyov.

In the history of work on the ISS, descent vehicles returned to Earth along a ballistic trajectory only twice. Last October, the descent of the 15th crew of the space station ended with a “hard landing.” Then the Soyuz TMA-10, which included the Russians Fedor Yurchikhin, Oleg Kotov and the first Malaysian cosmonaut, Sheikh Muzafar Shukor, deviated from the planned landing point by 70 kilometers, about which the cosmonauts failed to warn the control center in time - experiencing colossal overloads, they They were saving air, so they didn’t open their mouths. A special commission investigating the “standard landing option” then quickly found out the reason for the change in trajectory: the cable connecting the descent control panel with the Soyuz equipment was damaged, which already indicates an emergency situation.

The 16th crew of the ISS began preparing to return to Earth immediately after a replacement arrived in orbit less than two weeks ago: Russian cosmonauts Sergei Volkov, Oleg Kononenko, as well as Lee So Yeon, who spent only ten days in orbit. On her last day on the space station, the first woman captain of the ISS, Peggy Whitson, who now holds the record among her compatriots for the number of days “lived” in orbit, handed over the ship’s bell, according to tradition, to 35-year-old Sergei Volkov, who became the youngest commander.

Kirill MELNIKOV