The failure of all six main control computers on the international space station's Russian segment has baffled space engineers in Houston and in Moscow. Temporary repairs aren’t enough. If the cause of the sudden simultaneous failures cannot be quickly identified and remedied, the space station's future operations are under threat.The German-built computers, which operate in pairs, went out Wednesday morning, and several attempts to reboot them were unsuccessful. By Thursday morning, some basic communication functions were briefly restored, but the computers failed again after only seven minutes. An understanding of the root problem was still far off.
Controllers at Russian Mission Control told the station's two Russian crew members to take catnaps during the day, because they would be up all night once the station was back in direct radio contact with Russia and serious debugging could begin.
The glitch appears to be the space station's most serious computer failure since 2001, when the control computers on the U.S. side of the station experienced a cascade collapse that nearly lobotomized the station. Another computer failure, on the day the station's first component was launched in 1998, nearly caused the module to crash.
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