According to him, the U.S. astronaut and the Russian cosmonaut worked so intensively that produced extra disturbance of the station's hull, which preliminary stopped the gyrodynes, ensuring the ISS orientation. "The U.S. and Russian Mission Control Center's experts are looking into the reasons why these disturbances were growing following an avalanche pattern, we have never experienced anything of the sort", said Mr. Soloviev.
He pointed out that all space systems on the ISS had rather simple design. "The systems consist of three elements - sensors, logic units and drives. As soon as the sensors detect accumulation of angular momentum, the logic unit commands the gyroscopes to counteract, they can do it until a certain moment, but then get saturated, which led to the short-term disorientation of the station on the orbit", explained the expert.
At the same time, according to Mr. Soloviev, the Mission Control Center is satisfied with the crew's work. "They experienced problems with communications and the gyroscopes, but despite all this, they accomplished all scheduled EVA ahead of time, having spent four and a half hours instead of planned six hours", Mr. Soloviev pointed out. "All this gives certain grounds for optimism, so for September 3 we plan to perform next EVA", concluded Vladimir Soloviev.
The crew managed to fit the Zvezda module with laser reflectors and a new radio link antenna for docking the new European cargo spacecraft Jules Verne, and replace some elements of the extravehicular scientific equipment and the cable of the malfunctioning camera to be installed by the Russian crew commander and U.S. onboard engineer Michael Fincke during the next EVA.
The next Russian cargo spacecraft Progress M-50 will be launched to the station on August 11 from Baikonur and docked on August 14. The spacecraft will carry parcels for the crew, foodstuffs, water, spare parts and some of the freights intended for the tenth main expedition, which will start for the ISS on October 9.
The expedition will be made up of the current crew's backup cosmonauts Salizhan Sharipov of Russia and Leroy Ciao of the United States. They may be accompanied for a week by either a tourist, whose candidacy is being determined by the Federal Space Agency, or the Russian Space Forces' cosmonaut No.1 Yuri Shargin.
