False alarm delays Russian manned spaceship's return flight
MOSCOW. September 24. KAZINFORM A false activation of the airtightness sensor early Friday has postponed the return flight of Russian Soyuz TMA-18 spacecraft by 24 hours, said head of Russian federal space agency Anatoly Perminov; Kazinform refers to Xinhua.
"A preliminary report by technical experts indicates that the station computer received a false airtightness alarm after the hatches were closed on the Soyuz and the International Space Station (ISS)," said Perminov as quoted by the Interfax news agency.
"The checks conducted suggest that the airtightness was not impaired, but a 24-hour timeout was taken to get a confirmation that the alarm was false," added the Roscosmos head.
Soyuz TMA-18 was originally scheduled to undock from the ISS at 05:39 a.m. Moscow time (0139 GMT) and land at 08:55 a.m. Moscow time (0455 GMT) to the southeast of central Kazakh city of Jezkazgan, bringing down to earth Russian and NASA astronauts Alexander Skvortsov, Mikhail Korniyenko and Tracy Caldwell-Dyson; Kazinform cites Xinhua.
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