This morning's ISS attitude anomaly during EVA

I'm gathering info on what looks like a contingency procedure used
to restore attitude control halfway through the EVA, due to some sort
of disturbance caused, perhaps, by the astronauts themselves. The
S-band comm failure seems to have resulted from the invocation
of this half-baked contingency plan. Any contributions, out there?

["Followup-To:" header set to sci.space.station.]
On 2004-08-03, Jim Oberg wrote:
I'm gathering info on what looks like a contingency procedure used
to restore attitude control halfway through the EVA, due to some sort
of disturbance caused, perhaps, by the astronauts themselves. The
S-band comm failure seems to have resulted from the invocation
of this half-baked contingency plan. Any contributions, out there?

There was some brief discussion on seesat-l this morning; not sure of
the source or the accuracy, but a couple of comments (from various
messages):

"They have gone to free drift mode because the gyro's in the russian
part were up to 90% of their maxium load and have to be reset."
(...)
"They have also just confirmed that this is because the crew are so far
out, on the complex."
(...)
"They were at the end of the russian module, so the thrusters could
not be used. They moved back to the middle part and the stations
attitude was astablished by the thrusters."

--
-Andrew Gray