Astronauts fix another failed computer on shuttle
The pilots on NASA’s last space shuttle flight fixed another one of their main computers Friday after it failed and set off an alarm that shattered their sleep.
NASA declared all five of Atlantis’ primary computers to be working, pending evaluation of the latest shutdown.
Computer failures like this are extremely rare in orbit, said lead flight director Kwatsi Alibaruho. The two problems appear to be quite different, he noted. The first was caused by a bad switch throw; the second possibly by cosmic radiation. “The fact that we did have two computer failures on a same flight on a spacecraft that’s otherwise performing beautifully, that’s not at all lost on me,” Alibaruho told reporters.
