Baikonur Surgeon brought huge support to the project

Few days ago engineers detected a non nominal drop of power on one of the Spacecraft antennas.

With the support of an infra red camera supplied by the Russian a "hot spot" was detected in a wave guide (narrow tube) inside the spacecraft. Then, it became a serious assumption that "something", reflecting the radiation, had sneaked in a place where it should not have.

But how to reach this place almost in the "heart" of the spacecraft without putting it in pieces?
The best option to confirm this hypothesis was then to perform an endoscopic examination through this narrow canal.

After having dropped out the option to get an endoscope brought from Europe (too long and too complicated), it was then envisaged to use a local endoscope and possibly a medical one as those used by surgeons to look in lungs or stomach....

Two medical endoscopes were available at the Baikonur. The reply of the Baikonur Hospital to the project's request (with the very efficient support from our Russian colleagues) to borrow one was positive: The loan should be short in order not to disrupt the medical activity and would have to be supported by a medical Surgeon to operate it.

The first question of Tatiana, the Surgeon, when she arrived at the MIK was:
-Where is the patient?
-In the clean room!
...was the answer

She then dressed like a surgeon before an operation with protective gown strapped in the back while engineering personnel in clean rooms put it the other way (strapped on the front) and put latex gloves as she was going to operate on a real patient.

Then the CS-2 examination could start:


A second attempt with a thinner endoscope was the successful one: the "foreign object"could be seen but not identified yet.

Below is a picture of the "foreign object" as seen in the waveguide via the medical endoscope (the "object" is the dark spot at the bottom of the tube, positioned in the curve in fact):

Credits: Richard

After the "object" had been seen, the second step was now to extract it.

For that purpose, Tatiana made the use of a pinch which is a built- in feature of the endoscope and asked for the support of a surgeon-assistant.
Instructions were very clear:
-Push the thumb-handle to open the pinch and pull to close it.


To make it short, this method was successfully applied after several attempts together with the support of an external magnet to facilitate the move of the magnetic object through the wave guide.

After a period of intensive suspense and effort the foreign object eventually went out. This event was welcome by a big applause in clean room.

This is the piece that was extrated the end...


It is not the intention here to enter into technical details. Investigations have obviously continued to answer numerous questions before the problem could be definitely closed from engineering and project standpoints. But the good news is that with all these amazing efforts from ALL the team here in Baikonur, the power of the antenna is now back to normal and the campaign is back on track.

Tatiana was certainly of great help for us and was congratulated by Richard, ESA CS-2 project manager, who gave her a small gold-plated CryoSat-2 pin as a present for her intervention on a very unusual patient.

She just replied:
-Ja ochen' rada pomoch' (i am very glad to help)

and added that this very day was in fact ... Tatiana's day!