Dangerous repairs to the crippled Mir space station will be left to a relief crew next month, Russian officials said yesterday after telling the weary and accident-prone cosmonauts now on board to stand down.
Deputy mission director Igor Goncharov said Cdr Vasily Tsibliyev, who has developed stress-related heart trouble, and Flight Engineer
Alexander Lazutkin would keep the stricken craft in Earth orbit until they hand over to replacements Anatoly Solovyov and Pavel Vinogradov.
"It was decided to hand over the repairs to the next crew. The repairs will be undertaken after the present crew leaves on August
14th," Mr Goncharov told a briefing. The two Russians now on board had been due to return to Earth on August 26th.
Mr Solovyov and Mr Vinogradov, who will no longer take French scientist Mr Leopold Eyharts along due to the need to repair Mir's power system, blast off on August 5th for the two-day trip to Mir.
That gives them a week to take over the controls.
NASA physicist Mr Michael Foale, who had been preparing to step in and take Cdr Tsibliyev's place in the two-man repair team after the commander fell ill, is not due to leave Mir until mid-September, when he will return to Earth aboard a US shuttle.
The decision was taken during a meeting of top Russian space officials yesterday. It had been widely expected since the latest calamity hit Mir last Thursday when a tired crewman crashed the on-board computer by pulling out a wrong cable.
Mr Lazutkin (39) and Mr Tsibliyev (43) had hoped to carry out repairs to electric cables last week but Cdr Tsibliyev developed an irregular heartbeat due to stress. Mission Control first delayed the job to the end of this week and then asked Mr Foale to step in.
The crew has been limping through space since an unmanned cargo craft being manoeuvred by Cdr Tsibliyev collided with the station's
Spektr scientific module on June 25th, punching a small hole in it and smashing one of its four solar power panels.
In the parallel space mission which has fascinated many, communication was re-established between the Mars Pathfinder and
Earth early yesterday after mission controllers had been left without scientific data for two days. The latest signal was received from the lander just after midnight.
"We did it. We got the spacecraft," said project manager Mr Brian
Muirhead at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.
"It was exactly what we expected it to be. It went off at precisely the right time. Believe me, there were a lot of happy faces when we saw that blip," Mr Muirhead said.
A signal received by controllers was weaker than expected and provided no scientific data.
Scientists had been hoping to retrieve data which was missed on
Saturday because of a misconfigured Earth antenna. The material included pictures, rock analyses and a weather report.
Mr Muirhead said the little information received indicated that both the lander and Sojourner rover were healthy and the rover remained safely at a whitish rock nicknamed Scooby Doo. - (Reuter)