Astronauts fix leak on ISS
Multinational astronaut team set to enjoy long weekend after likely hit with space junk
The crew on board the International Space Station plans for a quiet Labor Day weekend after a Russian cosmonaut finished repairing a small air leak that originated from a hole on the side of the orbiting laboratory.
International Space Station crewmembers are planning for a quiet Labor Day weekend after a Russian cosmonaut on Friday finished repairing a small air leak that originated from a hole on the side of the orbiting laboratory.
The air leak was discovered Wednesday night while the six astronauts on board slept, but flight controllers decided it was small enough that they did not need to be awakened. After tracing the leak to the Russian side of the complex, cosmonauts plugged the hole with an epoxy-based sealant by noon Thursday. The patch job was finished Friday, and crewmembers got back to their regular work aboard the station.
“Yesterday showed again how valuable our emergency training is,” Alexander Gerst, the European Space Agency astronaut on board, wrote on Twitter early Friday morning. “We could locate and stop a small leak in our Soyuz, thanks to great cooperation between the crew and control centres on several continents.”
Russian design engineers believe the hole — measuring a fifth of a centimeter in diameter (about the thickness of a penny) found in the upper sec-
tion of the Soyuz spacecraft attached to the station — was caused by a small rock particle, or “micrometeorite,” hitting the station. The Russians’ Soyuz has been the only way to get to station since 2011, when the U.S. space shuttle program was shuttered.
Impacts from micrometeorites, commonly known as space junk, happen all the time, but the space station’s numerous shielding elements generally prevent serious damage from occurring.
As of Friday, the Russian space agency Roscosmos still had not officially confirmed the cause.
The patchwork is holding, but Kelly Humphries, spokesman for NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, said the Russian space agency is conducting a “standard state commission to review the big picture situation.”
No new leaks had been discovered Friday, he added, and “mission controls in Houston and Moscow are monitoring pressures.”
If left unchecked, the air leak could have resulted in total air loss for the station in 18 days. But Sergei Krikalyov, Roscosmos executive director for manned programs, told state-run news agency TASS on Friday that the epoxybased sealant Russian cosmonauts used “was made thicker for more reliability in order to make sure that nothing would swell up there. This is a sort of a sealant with a safety margin.”
While Russian cosmonaut Sergey Prokopyev finished patching the hole Friday, the rest of the crew returned to business as usual: preparing for space walks and doing experiments.
The space station, which rotating crewmembers have called home since 2000, has experienced problems in the past. In 2004, an air pressure drop was caused by a leaking flex hose in the U.S. laboratory, CNN reported at the time. And another air leak occurred on the U.S. side in 2007, Scientific American reported.
Over the years, the space station has been plagued by numerous ammonia leaks and computer problems.
Federal officials are currently discussing ending support for the space station in the near future, eliminating funding by the end of 2024 and handing its operations over to commercial companies by 2025. That plan — which NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine admitted last month might not be feasible — must be approved by Congress.
NASA officials said Friday that flight controllers will continue to monitor the station’s air pressure, but that the crew is planning “a quiet weekend before embarking on a busy schedule of research and routine maintenance work next week.”