ISRO has halted its attempt to dock 2 spacecraft together in orbit, after encountering problems. After closing the separation distance to within 3 meters, apparently the Chaser spacecraft is suffering a computer crash, because its guidance control loop is encountering excessive variability in the readings from the optical sensors. It's hard to say without further details, but it may be some kind of parallax issue. They'll try to resume their docking efforts after studying the data to solve the problem, but in the meantime the spacecraft have been returned to a safer separation distance of 64 meters.
SpaDeX Docking Update:
— ISRO (@isro) January 12, 2025
A trial attempt to reach up to 15 m and further to 3 m is done.
Moving back spacecrafts to safe distance
The docking process will be done after analysing data further.
Stay tuned for updates.#SpaDeX #ISRO
Anyway, space rendezvous & docking is a previously unattempted advanced capability that ISRO is attempting to master, and so it's natural that things can go wrong along the way. That's all par for the course.
The only issue I'd take here is how they're speaking as if everything's gone according to plan, without even acknowledging that any problem has occurred.
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