NASA Regains Contact with Space Station after Brief Communication Loss

NASA temporarily lost contact with the International Space Station (ISS) Tuesday following a computer problem, but communication was restored in less than three hours.

Communication between the space station and NASA was lost at 9:45 a.m., when the flight controllers in Houston were in the process of updating the space station's command and control software. They were transitioning from the primary computer to the backup computer to complete the software load, when one of the space station's data relay systems malfunctioned, the space agency said. 

Mission control officials in Houston were able to communicate with the astronauts aboard the station when it flew over Russian ground stations before 11 a.m. The crew was instructed to connect another computer to begin the process of restoring communications. Following the efforts, NASA regained contact with the ISS in less than three hours.

"Communications with the station were restored at 12:34 p.m. EST, following efforts by the onboard crew and the flight control team on the ground to correct a loss of communications that began at 9:45 a.m.," NASA said in a statement.

The space station is a research laboratory orbiting some 250 miles above Earth. It was built in 1998 by five space agencies including NASA, Russian Federal Space Agency, the European ESA, the Japanese JAXA and the Canadian CSA, to carry out various research experiments.

Currently, Expedition 34's six-member crew is aboard the space station. All six crew members will work until March, after which the three-member group of NASA's Kevin Ford (commander of Expedition 34), flight engineers Oleg Novitskiy and Evgeny Tarelkin will undock from the Poisk module and return to Earth.

Canadian Space Agency astronaut Chris Hadfield will take over as the commander of Expedition 35. Three more members will join Expedition 35 crew in March.