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 CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) - Astronauts will have to go out and replace a failed circuit breaker outside the international space station, but the work can be put off for a few months because the orbiting complex is holding steady, a NASA official said Thursday.
A circuit breaker popped open Wednesday and cut off power to one of the gyroscopes needed to keep the space station stable and pointed in the right direction. It was a new circuit breaker put in by spacewalking astronauts less than a year ago, to replace one that failed in seemingly identical fashion.
Space station program manager Bill Gerstenmaier said in both cases, the culprit appears to be a bad transistor in the circuit breaker, the result of a design flaw. These circuit breakers have failed 12 times in various components inside and outside the station, he said. They are being redesigned.
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