Plumber wanted for ISS

Washington, May 28: The international space station’s lone toilet is broken, leaving the crew with almost nowhere to go. So Nasa may order an in-orbit plumbing service call when space shuttle Discovery visits next week. Until then, the three-man crew will have to make do with a jury-rigged system when they need to urinate.

While one of the crew was using the Russian-made toilet last week, the toilet motor fan stopped working, according to Nasa. Since then, the liquid waste gathering part of the toilet has been working on-and-off. Fortunately, the solid waste collecting part is functioning normally. Russian officials don’t know the cause of the problem and the crew has been unable to fix it.

The crew has used the toilet on the Soyuz return capsule, but it has a limited capacity. They are now are using a back-up bag-like collection system that can be connected to the broken toilet, according to Nasa public affairs officials.

"Like any home anywhere the importance of having a working bathroom is obvious," Nasa spokesman Allard Beutel said.

The 7-year-old toilet has broken once before but not for as long a time, said Johnson Space Center spokeswoman Nicole Cloutier in Houston. Discovery is already set for launch on Saturday with a planned docking with the space station on Monday. Cloutier said. —AP

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Glitch on Mars Lander

Washington, May 28: A communications glitch between the Phoenix Mars probe and Earth has delayed operations, two days after the spacecraft landed on the Red Planet in search of conditions to support life, Nasa said.

A "transient event" knocked out UHF radio transmissions between Phoenix and the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), which relays data and instructions between the Phoenix and Earth, said Fuk Li, the Mars Exploration Programme manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California on Tuesday.

The problem forced the mission to delay starting the deployment of the spacecraft’s 2.35-metre backhoe-like arm, to be used to dig into the icy soil of the Martian arctic to collect samples.

Li said a possible cause of the MRO radio failure — which he said had never occurred before — was high-speed cosmic ray particles colliding with it. National Aeronautics and Space Administration scientists were actively working to repair the glitch, he said. The problem was not with the Phoenix, Li emphasised.

—AFP