• Question: Is there any interesting anomalies that you can't explain?

    Asked by Random pixel addict to Anne, Beth, COLFlight, Jon, Tom on 4 Oct 2015.
    • Photo: Columbus Flight Directors

      Columbus Flight Directors answered on 4 Oct 2015:

      Sergio:
      In average, we have about one anomaly per day, sometimes more.
      There are small anomalies and big anomalies, there are anomalies that happen only once, there are others that are recurrent and happen again from time to time.

      We rarely can explain the anomalies straight away when they happen for the first time. Luckily we have a big team of very experienced engineers that look into the anomalies after they happen, and most of the times in few days we are able to explain what happened and why.
      It’s difficult because you can’t put your hands on the hardware, you have to understand what happened based on numbers you see from ground, pictures and information given by the astronauts. This is also what makes the job exciting and interesting!

      However, there are also rare cases in which even after a long time we still don’t understand why something happened.
      In such cases, we try to develop what we call “workarounds”, which is some different ways of doing the same thing so that we can complete the experiment successfully even with the anomaly

    • Photo: Beth Healey

      Beth Healey answered on 8 Oct 2015:

      Of course, i’m a scientist!

      There are lot’s of things we can’t explain (anomalies) which is what keeps our job interesting 🙂

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