NASA engineers have revived a vital air-scrubbing system on the International Space Station and are hunting for the source of the glitch that sent it offline.

The American-built air scrubber, called a Carbon Dioxide Removal Assembly (CDRA), shut down Saturday, sending engineers on Earth scrambling for a fix while a record 13 people work aboard the space station.
They ultimately revived the life support gear in a manual mode, one that requires extra flight controllers on Earth to keep it working. Normally, the system runs automatically and NASA is hopeful that a software patch expected late Sunday will recover that ability as well.
A heater in the system got stuck on and tripped a circuit breaker, shutting the system down, mission managers said.
“We're still trying to determine exactly what the root cause of the problem was,” space station flight director Brian Smith told reporters in a Sunday briefing. “But in the meantime, we're doing a great job managing the carbon dioxide.”
Two air-scrubbing systems, NASA's CDRA device and its Russian counterpart Vozdukh, are both required to work properly to support the space station's full six-man crew, as well as the additional seven astronauts who are visiting from NASA's shuttle Endeavour.
Smith said that at no point did mission managers plan to cut Endeavour's stay short at the space station if the CDRA system wasn't restored.
The station has a stockpile of extra air-scrubbing canisters that could have supported the large joint crew for the rest of their docked mission, he added.
(Source: Space.com)