The main computer on board the Mir space station broke down again on Saturday, ITAR-TASS news agency reported on Monday, saying that the incident had so far been kept secret.

It took ground control half an hour to analyse the situation and to instruct the Mir crew to switch to a back-up computer, the agency said, quoting Deputy Flight Commander Viktor Blagov.

One effect of the incident was that the gyrostats which automatically align Mir to the sun stopped functioning.

However, the crew managed to put this right on Saturday and was now working according to plan, Blagov said.

BBC Monitoring (http://www.monitor.bbc.co.uk), based in Caversham in southern England, selects and translates information from radio, television, press, news agencies and the Internet from 150 countries in more than 70 languages.
 

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