The crew of the International Space Station (ISS) on Sunday was inspecting an attached Russian space capsule that might have been damaged by a micrometeorite, while ground controllers considered whether to send up a replacement ship to ferry some of them home.
Russia’s Roscosmos said the crew was using a camera on a Canadian-built robotic arm to capture images of the Soyuz MS-22 where a coolant leak was detected on Wednesday last week.
After the images are transmitted to the ground yesterday, space officials would analyze them — along with other data about the problem — by the end of the month and decide on next steps.
Photo: AP
One option, Roscomos said, is to expedite the delivery of another Soyuz capsule to the space station. Workers at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan were preparing to launch Soyuz MS-23 to the space station in March with three crew members, but could send it up sooner without a crew. That would allow some of the seven crew now on the space station to return home.
A Russian space official on Thursday said that a micrometeorite could have caused the leak. Roscosmos said the damage was to the outer skin of an instrument and equipment compartment.
Roscosmos and NASA both say the problem does not pose any danger to the crew.
The leak prompted a pair of Russian cosmonauts to abort a planned spacewalk on Wednesday last week. A US spacewalk is planned for tomorrow.
NASA said the Soyuz capsule’s thrusters were tested on Friday and worked normally.
Sergei Krikalev, a veteran cosmonaut and director of Roscosmos’ crewed space flight programs, said the leak could affect the performance of the capsule’s coolant system and the temperature in the equipment section of the capsule.
Russia’s Ria-Novosti news agency reported that the capsule’s temperature had risen, but that ground controllers were able to reduce it to normal levels. The agency did not explain how the temperature was reduced.
On Wednesday last week, as Russian cosmonauts Sergey Prokopyev and Dmitri Petelin were about to venture outside the station on the spacewalk, ground specialists saw a stream of fluid and particles emanating from the Soyuz capsule on a video feed.
Prokopyev, Petelin and NASA astronaut Frank Rubio had used the capsule to arrive at the ISS on Sept. 21, and it serves as a lifeboat for the crew. The capsule was scheduled to return to Earth with some of the space station’s crew in March.
Along with Prokopyev, Petelin and Rubio, four other crew members are also on the ISS: NASA astronauts Nicole Mann and Josh Cassada; Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency’s Koichi Wakata; and Anna Kikina of Roscosmos.
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