Returning ISS Astronauts 'flew blind' after Soyuz sensors failed

The three crew of the International Space Station (ISS) who returned to Earth this week endured a hair-raising descent after their height sensors failed, a Russian cosmonaut revealed on Friday.

Pavel Vinogradov said that he and the two other crew of the Soyuz capsule which touched down in Kazakhstan Wednesday had groped their way through the landing after they lost all data about their height from the ground.

"There were problems. For some reason after the undocking all our parameters disappeared. Essentially, after the undocking, we flew blind," he said at the Star City cosmonaut training centre outside Moscow, quoted by Russian news agencies.

He said that the only data the crew could receive about their approach to the earth -- crucial for knowing when to fire the engines to soften the landing -- came from the salvage team on the ground.

He said the rescue teams were able to radio to the crew that they were 300 metres (1,000 feet) and then 100 metres (330 feet) from the ground in the Soyuz capsule, which lands vertically with the help of a parachute after reentering the atmosphere.

"I managed to count eight seconds and we touched down very softly," he said, adding that aside from the usual G-forces and jolting "everyone felt normal".

Vinogradov, fellow Russian cosmonaut Alexander Misurkin and NASA astronaut Chris Cassidy touched down on the Kazakh steppe on Wednesday morning, in a landing that at the time seemed hitch-free.

Russia is currently the only nation capable of transporting humans to the ISS in its Soyuz rocket and capsule system after the withdrawal of the US shuttle.

UPDATE
However, the head of Russia's Federal Space Agency denied the cosmonaut's claim Friday, RIA Novosti reported.

"It wasn't a blind landing," Vladimir Popovkin said, explaining mission control simply switched off an information display in the landing module of the Soyuz TMA-08M spacecraft.

The cosmonauts still had enough readings to complete the landing procedure without problems, he said.

"Two dates simply overlapped in a program, and we had to turn off the [information] display so that [the readings] would not be patchy on the screen," Popovkin said.

The Legend and Name of Sally Ride Lives on as AGOR ship

Prof Sally Ride

The United States Navy's first academic research ship to be named after a woman will be christened R/V Sally Ride after NASA's first female astronaut to fly in space.

She became the first American woman to enter space in a low Earth orbit in 1983, a full twenty years after the Soviet Union's first woman astronaut Valentina Tereshkova.

Dr Sally Ride left NASA in 1987 to work as a Professor at Stanford University's Center for International Security and Arms Control and had served on the investigation panels for two space shuttle disasters (Challenger and Columbia)—the only person to serve on both.

Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus announced Friday (April 12) the next ocean-class Auxiliary General Oceanographic Research (AGOR) ship will be named the R/V Sally Ride.

"As secretary of the Navy, I have the great privilege of naming ships that will represent America with distinction as part of the fleet for many decades to come," Mabus said in a statement revealing the names of seven ships, including the Sally Ride.

"These ships were all named to recognise the hard working people from cities all around our country who have contributed in so many ways to our Navy and Marine Corps team."

Mabus named the future R/V Sally Ride in memory of the astronaut, who also served as a professor, scientist and innovator at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography (SIO) at the University of California in San Diego. Scripps will operate the R/V Sally Ride when it enters the Navy's fleet in 2015.

Dr Sally Ride, 65, died on July 23, 2012, as a result of pancreatic cancer.

The R/V Sally Ride, a Neil Armstrong-class AGOR ship, is the U.S. Navy's first research vessel named after a woman. 

It is named after the late great Prof Sally Ride, America's first woman in space.

CREDIT: Department of Defense

Valentina Tereshkova (born 6 March 1937) is a retired Soviet cosmonaut and the first woman to have flown in space, having been selected from more than four hundred applicants and five finalists to pilot Vostok 6 on 16 June 1963.

It took NASA and the US Adminstration a further 20 years to finally approve of women astronauts. Until that time they were thought NOT capable of the Right Stuff!

Brian Binnie - First Scottish person in Space

Binnie was born in West Lafayette, Indiana, where his Scottish father was a professor of physics at Purdue University.

The family returned to Scotland when Binnie was five, and lived in Aberdeen (his father taught at Aberdeen University) and later in Stirling.

When Binnie was a teenager the family moved to Boston.

Binnie, an alumnus of Brown and Princeton Universities, served for 21 years in the United States Navy as a naval aviator flying the A-7 Corsair II, A-6 Intruder, F/A-18 Hornet, and AV-8B Harrier II.

He graduated from the U.S. Naval Test Pilot School in 1988.

Binnie also co-piloted the Atmospheric Test Vehicle of the Rotary Rocket.

In 2006, he received an Honorary degree from University of Aberdeen.


On December 17, 2003, the 100th anniversary of the Wright brothers' first powered flight, Binnie piloted the first powered test flight of SpaceShipOne, flight 11P, which reached a top speed of Mach 1.2 and a height of 20.7 kilometers.

On October 4, 2004, he piloted SpaceShipOne's second Ansari X Prize flight, flight 17P, winning the X Prize and becoming the 435th person, and the first citizen of Scotland, to go into space.

His flight, which peaked at 367,442 feet (69.6 mi; 112.0 km), set a winged aircraft altitude record, breaking the old record set by the North American X-15 in 1963.

It also earned him the second set of Astronaut Wings to be given by the FAA for a flight aboard a privately-operated commercial spacecraft.