Mir Manual Docking System — Toru Control Panel and Attitude Control Joystick

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The “Toru” control system resided on the Mir Space station and by use of the joystick, an approaching unmanned supply ship can be controlled remotely. This particular one was used in the Mir that stayed in Russia for training of all of the cosmonauts.

20 years ago, it was this manual Toru system that led to the collision of the approaching Progress spacecraft into the Mir, breaching the hull and threatening the lives of the crew. Mir went into a spin, and lacking power for control systems, the de-spin was a manual estimation process from looking out the window, implemented remotely by ground control (details below).

The Attitude Control Joystick “РУД”
This joystick help to move the spacecraft in three dimensions-forwards, backwards, left, right, up, down. This one was used for training purposes. The joystick can be mechanically locked into any position to hold it in place.

2 responses to “Mir Manual Docking System — Toru Control Panel and Attitude Control Joystick”

jurvetson

Mar 12, 2017 at 7:17 am

The Mir setup also had a Toru Docking Sensor Control Panel (I also have the Mir hatch seen overhead, and the white cylinder fire extinguisher on the wall)

Here is the collision damage to Mir when the Progress craft collided with it, a failure of the Toru control system: The damaged solar array of the Spektr module following the collision between Mir and the Progress M-34 freighter on 25 June 1997: From NASA: "The collision had knocked Mir into a spin; and the power outage had shut down the gyrodynes so that the spin now went uncontrolled. To stop the spin and face the arrays toward the Sun, the crew needed to know the spin rate of Mir. However, the computer and other instruments were out of operation. So, in the dark and in the silence, Foale went to the windows in the airlock and held his thumb up to the field of stars. Combining a sailor’s technique with a scientist’s knowledge of physics, Foale estimated the spin rate of the space station. Then, he and Lazutkin radioed the estimates down to the Moscow Control Center. The ground controllers fired Mir’s engines, and that stopped the spin—certainly not perfectly, and in no way permanently; but it showed that it could be done."

Here’s Mir in its glory days A similar joystick was featured in the movie Gravity: And with astronaut Ed Lu training with a near-identical unit on the ISS And for reference, these are the markings at the bottom of the joystick

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jurvetson

Apr 21, 2017 at 11:03 pm

NASA’s failure analysis.

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