International Space station

I don't think many would have read the article from IEEE spectrum online regarding the latest failure of three main computers that control the orientation of the entire station. The reason given for the failure might seem a little bit silly but makes people wonder how such a small thing can can catastrophe of large scale. The reason was malfunctioning of dehumidifier. The dehumidifier in the control room should remove the water content from air circulated and keep the machines under condition where the water cannot condense onto any system. The reverse happened and has allowed for condensation. This has caused the rusting of the lead wires that are connected to the back up computers. The back up computers are used to protect the main system when there are spikes introduced in the system due to the power supply from the solar panels which are affected by cosmic clouds. Because of this rusting they became non-conductive causing the backup system not to work but the main system alone to shut down, which means there will be no system working to take care of orientation. Another bizarre thing found was the logic used. All three systems ( main system and 2 back up systems) would shut down simultaneously rather than act as back up in case of main system failure.

This could have caused a large scale devastation as a manual orientation control would mean unoptimized usage of the fuel. This would reduce the stability of the system to a great extent. Hope these small things are taken care of in future. This is an extract(only the Jist) from IEEE spectrum magazine written in the way i have understood it. The original article was written by an ex-NASA scientist.

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