May. 29th, 2008

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One of the negative aspects of working long hours on an interpreting assignment is the inability to get much of a personal nature done outside of business hours.

I made up for most of that today, though. (And I am going to deliberately ignore the little voice that asks "But was it enough?")

I ran across a singular term today in the course of work, used by folks who work the ADCO (pronounced "ad-coe") position in the control room. ADCO stands for Attitude Determination and Control Officer, and their job basically consists in making sure orbiting vehicles and space stations are pointing in the right direction as they hurtle through space.

The term is "force fight," which describes a situation where two separate attitude control systems attempt to operate at the same time, each unaware of the other's activity, like a pilot and copilot trying to simultaneously fly a plane without coordinating between themselves. Coordination between systems takes the form of networked communication between the computer resources of the respective attitude control systems, and maintaining this awareness is very important when dealing with something as massive as the ISS, as a prolonged force fight could have pretty serious consequences.

The Russian equivalent term, I learned, is the descriptive "противодействие двух систем управления" (or the more literal "борьба двух систем управления").

While on the subject of terminology, I was sharp enough to remember that the Russian word "аборт," while a cognate of the English word "abort," is only used in a medical context. In the context of, say, an "aborted final approach" prior to docking, the Russian term would be "аварийное прерывание" or just "прерывание." (Of course, this wasn't hard to remember, as I got some really strange looks from the Russian delegation during a technical meeting a long time ago when I used "аборт" thoughout a technical session.)

Time to wind down.

Cheers...

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