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Jonathan McDowell of the Harvard-Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory has data verifying that Nauka is indeed maneuvering to match orbits with the ISS.

The Progress cargo vehicle pulled Pirs free from the ISS after a 20 year stay (it arrived in 2001, served as docking port for many visiting Russian spacecraft and as airlock for countless spacewalks) and both of them have already performed a destructive reentry over a remote part of the South Pacific. (You put in 20 years with the company and this is how you're treated...)

It appears now (according to the NASA-live coverage) that Nauka is expected to arrive at the Space Station on Thursday.

And for those like me who don't know, here's how the word 'nauka' is pronounced - 'na-oo-ka'. It means 'science' in Russian and many Slavic languages.

NASA photo from Space Station



Roscosmos photo from the Station showing Progress and Pirs burning up over the Pacific, heading out of night into the orbital sunrise. Even spacecraft have dreams of heaven... beautiful and poignant...

Daily Hopper's take on it...

BIG DRAMA on the Space Station this morning! Nauka arrived and successfully docked. The Russian cosmonauts were already doing leak checks and opening the hatches to Nauka, when Nauka unexpectedly started firing its thrusters without that having been commanded. Controllers apparently had trouble getting it to stop and were forced to use opposing thrusters on a visiting Progess cargo capsule to try to balance it out. The thrusting pushed the ISS abruptly 45 degrees out of proper orientation which would have been very obvious to the astronauts aboard as everything moved around them while emergency alarms were sounding. Probably scared the crap out of them! (Hope they have extra astronaut underwear.) White knuckles in Mission Control too, both in Moscow and in Houston. Latest is that the Russian flight controllers have disabled Nauka's thrusters so that they won't go crazy again.

They emphasize that the Station and the astronauts aboard are all safe, but I get the feeling that it was pretty hairy for a few minutes and it might have been a closer thing than they are letting on.

Video of Nauka arriving

https://twitter.com/Space_Station/status...0068285440

NASA summary of the situation

https://twitter.com/NASA/status/1420801401358364678

And

https://twitter.com/NASA/status/1420811795606933512

The NASA Flight Director in Mission Control for the ISS writes "Lead MLM Flight Director Greg Whitney and I split the shift today. Never have I ever: 1)been prouder of the team that sits in MCC and lives on @Space_Station, 2)had to declare a spacecraft emergency until now, 3)been so happy to see all solar arrays + radiators still attached"

That last indicates how serious they feared things might be, that the Space Station might come apart. They are trying to play everything down, but there's talk that the Crew Dragon on the American side of the Station was powered up for an emergency evacuation if that that became necessary. All kinds of emergency procedures were triggered by the events this morning.

https://twitter.com/Explorer_Flight/stat...4271495168

And tomorrow's Boeing Starliner OFT-2 mission has been postponed to give the Space Station time to sort itself out. Poor Boeing, delayed again and this one isn't remotely their fault.

https://blogs.nasa.gov/spacestation/2021...2-mission/

https://blogs.nasa.gov/spacestation/2021...er-firing/

NASA graphic that shows where Nauka is and the progress cargo capsule opposite that the Russian controllers had to use to damp out Nauka's out of control thruster firing. It also shows the solar arrays that are pretty fragile and not designed for violent maneuvers. They could easily have broken off.

While we are waiting for Crew-3 on Sunday night/Monday morning, the Russians launched an uncrewed Progress supply capsule to the Space Station using a Soyuz booster from Baikonur. Launch went perfectly.

I love how Chris Bergin says he loves how the Russian controller sounds like he's shouting through a 1930's telephone! (It's Russia, he probably is! I can picture it, big, black with a rotary dial.)

https://twitter.com/NASASpaceflight/stat...7086520328

The Russians are hard at work building Pad 1A at Vostochny (their new 'cosmodrome' in the Russian far east) for their Angara rocket. Angara will be Russia's new heavy lift rocket capable of orbiting space station modules and similarly large things. They plan to launch uncrewed lunar landers and space telescopes with it as well. It will come in multiple versions with different numbers of strap-on boosters and different upper stages. Its big weakness is that it isn't reusable.

Roscosmos photo

Video of a Russian Proton rocket launch at what appears to be Baikonur from 2012. Watch the remote camera come under attack from what looks like a squirrel at about the 2 minute mark

The Russians just did something very bad.

It seems that they conducted an ASAT test (anti-satellite weapon designed to shoot down enemy satellites) using their own Kosmos-1408 satellite as a test target. They successfully hit it and reduced it to a cloud of some 1500 trackable pieces of debris. The problem is that this shotgun blast of cosmic buckshot is in orbit(s) that intersect the orbit of the International Space Station!

https://www.spacecom.mil/News/Article-Di...long-last/

The always informative Jonathan McDowell has details

https://twitter.com/planet4589

And here's a Blue Origin engineer called Megs and cosmic collisions seem to be her thing. Lots of photos and useful information here:

https://twitter.com/megsylhydrazine

Interesting physics factoid from Megs -- The kinetic energy of a projectile is much more dependent on its velocity than on its mass -- KE = 1/2mv^2

Getting hit by even the tiniest fragment would be devastating to the Space Station. This block of solid aluminum was hit by a 1/2 ounce piece of plastic travelling 15,000 mph in a test:

(Photo from Megs)

Apparently the Space Station went into emergency mode, hatches were closed between segments to prevent them all from depressurizing if one was ruptured, and the Astronauts on the American side all retreated to their Crew-Dragon lifeboat just in case. I believe the Russian Cosmonauts on their side of their station did the same and powered up their Soyuz lifeboat.

Official statement from nasa.

https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasa-...-asat-test