"Geoff Blackmore" <geoff_184@xtra.co.nz> wrote in message news:<7nIxb.12670$VV6.278807@news.xtra.co.nz>...

Space Station's crew hear 'impact'

28.11.2003


HOUSTON - Crew members on the International Space Station yesterday reported
hearing a brief, metallic crunching noise as if something struck the outside
of the outpost, but checks turned up no damage.

Astronaut Mike Foale told Nasa's mission control that it sounded as if
something hit the rear of the station's Russian module that houses the crew
sleeping quarter, kitchen and toilet.

"It sounded like a metal tin can kind of being expanded and compressed,"
Foale told mission control. "It was a noise that lasted about a second. It
sounded like an impact or something."

News reports last month said some Nasa experts had warned that environmental
monitoring and health maintenance systems on the station had deteriorated to
the point that it was unsafe for astronauts.

Nasa has been under the microscope since the February 1 shuttle Columbia
accident that killed the seven astronauts on board.

Investigators blamed the disaster on lax safety procedures.

Russian astronaut Alexander Kaleri said he also heard the sound.

The astronauts, with Nasa engineers watching on the ground, used a video
camera on the station's 17m-long robot arm to scan the external section
where the sound came from, but saw no damage.

"All systems are intact," said Nasa spokesman Rob Navias. "All of the data
from the US and Russian sides shows nothing out of the ordinary."

Before Foale and Kaleri were sent up in a Russian Soyuz capsule on October
18 for a 200-day stay, Nasa officials said the station, which just marked
its third year of continuous occupation, was in good enough shape.

Nasa and its station partners in Russia, Europe, Japan and Canada opened the
$US95 billion ($150 billion) orbiting laboratory to long-duration crews in
2000 hoping it would mark a permanent human presence beyond Earth.

- REUTERS

Space station 'crunch' still a mystery
By MARK CARREAU
Copyright 2003 Houston Chronicle 
The source of an unusual crunching sound heard 
by the crew of the international space station 
earlier this week remains unexplained, but it 
does not appear to have come from an impact 
with space debris, a NASA spokesman said Friday. 
The brief sound early Wednesday outside the 
station was described by American Mike Foale, 
the station's commander, and Russian Alexander 
Kaleri, the flight engineer, as resembling an 
aluminum can being crunched or the sudden 
flexing of a thin sheet of the metal. 
Checks by NASA with the Department of Defense, 
which tracks thousands of small manmade objects 
in orbital space with radar, including 
satellites and debris from old rockets, did not 
reveal anything on a collision course with the 
240-mile high orbital base, space agency 
spokesman James Hartsfield said Friday. 
"There is not a lot left to analyze. Everything 
is working fine on board. Our best (external) 
camera surveys showed nothing out of the 
ordinary," said Hartsfield. "We did check with 
the (Pentagon), and they did not report 
anything tracking in the vicinity of the space 
station at the time." 
After taking much of Thanksgiving Day off, 
Foale and Kaleri resumed research and 
maintenance activities on Friday. 
But the topic of the unusual noise, which was 
heard outside the Russian crew dormitory module 
and lasted about one second, came up a couple 
of times in discussions with ground-based 
experts at Mission Control in Houston and 
outside Moscow. 
Yuri Malenchenko, the station's previous 
commander, told Foale and Kaleri of hearing 
similar noises while he and American Ed Lu 
lived and worked aboard the outpost. Their 
185-day mission came to an end in late October. 
Malenchenko is in Houston at NASA's Johnson 
Space Center for a mission debriefing session. 
"That sound was somewhat odd, unusual for that 
location. We never heard it before," Foale said 
(Friday) in a brief exchange with Russia's 
Mission Control. "I don't think it was anything. 
It was a sound, but nothing happened after that. 
I think everything is OK." 
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