On the morning of July 25, a brief power outage occurred at NASA's mission control centre in Houston, which led to a voice communications blackout with the International Space Station (ISS), reported CNN on July 26. This caused NASA to rely on backup systems for the first time. The outage lasted for about 90 minutes according to ISS Program Manager Joel Montalbano but did not pose any danger to the astronauts aboard the ISS, as they were able to communicate through Russian systems within 20 minutes of the outage.
The power outage impacted only the first floor of the mission control building and did not affect flight controllers or the rotating crew of NASA employees who continuously monitor the ISS from the main mission control room. However, it did affect the hardware responsible for providing essential communications, including voice contact and telemetry data about the space station's pressure levels, power, and position.
“It wasn’t an issue on board. It was purely a ground problem,” he said.
The issue occurred during planned upgrades to the mission control centre's power systems, triggered by a reconfiguration as part of the upgrading process. Despite knowing about the upgrade work, it took about an hour and a half to transition to the backup command and control system designed for use during emergencies like hurricane season or weather outages.
It was the first time NASA activated the backup control hardware at Johnson Space Center's Building 30, which houses the mission control. Temporary losses in communications have occurred before due to ground system upgrades or missed contact with communication satellites used by NASA for maintaining two-way communications with the ISS.
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