Astronauts inside the ISS
Credit: HANDOUT/NASA/AFP via Getty Images
The crew of the International Space Station were woken up in the middle of the night this week, to be told that an air leak in their craft had grown in size.
The three astronauts — one American, two Russians — had been working for several months to repair the air leak, which is not uncommon on board the ISS.
In the early hours of Monday however they were roused from their beds by Mission Control and told they needed to get to work.
Ultimately there was no cause for alarm: a temperature change on board the ISS has sparked a faulty reading of sensors.
“The size of the leak identified overnight has since been attributed to a temporary temperature change aboard the station with the overall rate of leak remaining unchanged,” Nasa said in a blog post on Tuesday, stressing that the three men were never in any danger.
The existing leak is causing an atmospheric pressure decrease of one millimeter every eight hours, officials with Roscosmos, the Russian federal space agency, said via Twitter this morning.
Analysis by ground teams traced this leak to the main work area inside a Russian ISS module called Zvezda.
This module contains life support equipment for the space station and also houses living quarters for two crew members.
Kenny Todd, deputy manager of the space station, said the leak was first detected more than a year ago but had increased in the past couple of months.
Astronauts deal with leak simulations during training for their stays on the space station, which typically are about six months long.
There have been a series of small leaks since the ISS launched in 1998. A catastrophic leak would see the air emptying, or even people being sucked out into space.
In the event of an emergency on the space station, the crew members could return to Earth via the Soyuz MS-16 spaceship that’s docked there. In a less extreme scenario, the crew could also cut off the leaking module and isolate it.
Свежие комментарии