Posted: June 16, 2007
Hoping for the best, space station commander Fyodor Yurchikhin and flight engineer Oleg Kotov hot wired two computers aboard the international space station today that engineers had feared were victims of fatal power supply failures. To everyone's delight, the machines promptly booted up and appeared to be running normally, two more successes in an improbable recovery from crippling computer crashes last week.
Two of the three computers making up the Russian segment's guidance, navigation and control computers, along with two of three central control computers, were successfully revived Friday when Yurchikhin and Kotov used jumper cables to bypass suspect surge protectors in secondary power supply circuits.
The redundant so-called soft switches were designed to shut off power to their respective computers in the event of surges or spikes in the incoming electricity. Engineers now believe the installation of a new solar power truss last Monday triggered a subtle change in the station's power grid that somehow caused the secondary power supply switches to respond, preventing their computers from booting up.
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