Glitch Blamed for Fire Alarm on Orbiter - New York Times
False alarm in the space station! Uh oh....click the link above to read the whole story!
Astronauts and mission managers scrambled yesterday when a fire alarm went off on the Russian part of the International Space Station. Within 20 minutes, however, the problem was determined to be a software glitch..
After alarms clanged in the background and a Russian interpreter seemed to grow breathless trying to keep up with the stream of discussion on the alarm and the response, Clayton C. Anderson, an astronaut on the space station, called down to mission control and said, “We looked around and smelled around,” and found no evidence of fire.
In a briefing for reporters from Houston, mission managers said the alarm was set off by a problem with Russian computers that work with American ones to control the navigation and functions of the station.
When the Russian computers failed, control of the attitude of the station was transferred to small maneuvering jets on the space shuttle Atlantis. But in that mode of control, the station’s solar panels rest in a poor position for gathering sunlight, so power levels dipped and mission control had to order some inessential equipment be turned off until attitude control could be turned back over to the station
