Not to be pedantic but I think the headline is fine.
If you simulated a fire in a building for training purposes and upon activating the fire alarm, it got broadcast to emergency services when it shouldn't, you did accidentally broadcast the fire alarm, simulated or not.
The "accidentally" already implies it was done in error, suggesting it was not an emergency. On the other hand, if it was a real emergency, and just wasn't meant to be publicly broadcasted, I feel like the headline would've looked different.
I guess considering I used to work in Mission Control and participate in these simulations, the language used here is something I notice probably more than others.
The simulation itself was broadcast. The astronauts and the sim team were in Houston. The alarm originated from a computer on the ground in Houston. The comm loops that were heard were from a sim on the ground in Houston. This headline would make more sense if NASA was troubleshooting alarms on ISS and configured things such that those messages would be on a private channel but messed up and the public heard them. In this context the fact that it was a sim is important.
Question, does the real distress signal, when flipped on the station have any automated features like closing hatches, warming up the landing module, or jettisoning hazardous storage?
I would guess that automated systems (especially jettisoning storage) would not be implemented as the gain is to low for the risk in case of a false alarm. There would always be someone reachable and awake in case of emergency to close hatches manually.
Warming up the landing module could be interesting though…
Nope, 2 completely separate things. The only thing that was messed up in this case were the comm loops that were broadcast and maybe some of the simulated messages that are sometimes shown on one of the big screens in the room (that the sim was in, there are a few FCR’s (Flight Control Rooms)) - but I’m not sure if they showed anything visually from the sim. When you go to log on to an activity in MCC, you log on to the sim if you’re the one doing the sim. It’s a whole separate thing to log into the actual flight even though all of the computers are still in MCC to make the environment more realistic.
Edit: I completely misread this, lol, but no. The crew would close hatches if they needed to - there have been plenty of false smoke/fire alarms on ISS to wake them up while they were sleeping to troubleshoot. (One Shuttle flight in particular, I can’t remember which one, but it was docked, was particularly annoying wrt the ISS false detector alarms during sleep) and they were woken up and had to perform that emergency procedure. There is a lot that can be commanded from the ground, so it’s not “automated” in the way that you’re thinking. The ground has to send a command before anything happens. But closing hatches and such is done manually by the crew.
Yesterday, a NASA livestream falsely indicated that an ISS astronaut was experiencing decompression sickness (DCS), a potentially life-threatening condition, ahead of a scheduled spacewalk.
NASA broadcast an emergency situation on board the ISS on Wednesday at 6:32 p.m., with a voice from ground control asking to put an unnamed “commander” in his spacesuit for hypobaric treatment after being exposed to increased pressure.
About an hour later, the space agency clarified that there was no emergency situation on the ISS; instead the aired audio was from a simulation channel on the ground “indicating a crew member was experiencing effects related to decompression sickness,” NASA wrote on X.
“This audio was inadvertently misrouted from an ongoing simulation where crew members and ground teams train for various scenarios in space and is not related to a real emergency,” NASA added.
Decompression sickness, also known as the bends, typically occurs with change in pressure during scuba diving and can sometimes affect astronauts during spacewalks, forming bubbles in the bloodstream.
NASA had scheduled a spacewalk on Thursday for astronauts Tracy Dyson and Matt Dominick to complete the removal of a faulty electronics box.
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