.
20.08.2013
US Navy: Navy SEAL Astronaut on Space Station Interview Navy Live blog coverage of the interview with U.S. Navy SEAL Cmdr.
Chris Cassidy on the International Space Station. We discussed the Navy's unmanned and manned role in space as well as Cmdr. Cassidy's
own experiences during a live interview Friday.
.
Frams: NAVY-TV
.
NASA-TV: Unidentified object floating outside station? Sort of... / Space Station Reports UFO To Mission Control Who Claim Its An Antenna Cover 8-19-2013
On the morning of August 19, NASA astronaut Chris Cassidy noticed an unidentified object floating outside the space station, near the Progress cargo vehicle. He called down to Mission Control Houston and took some video of it. Was it a UFO? Not really...Russian ground controllers identified it as an antenna cover from the Zvezda service module.
NASA astronaut Chris Cassidy radioed Mission Control to report an UFO 'unidentified object' floating outside the International Space Station on Aug. 19, 2013.
.
Frams: NASA-TV
.
NASA astronaut Chris Cassidy alerted ground controllers on Monday to an unidentified flying object floating near the International Space Station — but this was no alien spacecraft.
Instead, it was a piece of the station itself: Russian ground controllers identified it as an antenna cover from the Zvezda service module, one of the oldest parts of the station.
The sighting merited just a brief mention in NASA's latest space station status report, plus a short clip on NASA's YouTube channel. Because the antenna cover's speed in relation to the rest of the station was so low, it didn't pose that much of a collision hazard. But controllers were glad to see the debris fade off into the distance, heading for what they expected would be a brief, fiery re-entry in the atmosphere.
This wasn't the first station debris to cause a UFO stir: Back in 1998, during the shuttle Endeavour's mission to hook the U.S.-built Unity connecting node to the Russian-made Zvezda module, astronauts spotted a blobby object floating away from the scene. NASA determined that the object was a discarded thermal cover, but that didn't stop UFO fans from working the material into their tale of a mysterious "Black Knight" satellite that has been circling our planet for millennia.
Quelle: NBC
.
Update: 22.08.2013
The cover that came loose was spotted out of the ISS’ windows by Expedition crew members, was videoed the cover floating outside of the Station.
“Service Module (SM) Antenna Cover: The crew reported that they saw an item floating aft of the International Space Station (ISS). The object was later identified to be a SM antenna cover,” noted ISS status information.
“There are several similar covers on the SM and the team is working to identify which one was lost. Based upon the crew’s relative motion estimate, the antenna cover is not considered to be a recontact threat.”
The spacewalkers tightened the screws on the other WAL antennas during the EVA.