Russia’s space agency said it is considering a “rescue” plan to send an empty spacecraft to the International Space Station (ISS) to bring home three crew members ahead of schedule after their capsule Soyuz developed a coolant leak while docked with the orbiting outpost.
Roscosmos and NASA officials said at a news conference Thursday that they are continuing to investigate how the capsule’s external radiator coolant line suffered a small puncture last week, just as two cosmonauts were preparing for a routine spacewalk .
No final decision has been made on the precise means of returning the capsule’s three crew members to Earth, either by launching another Soyuz to retrieve them or by the seemingly less likely option of sending them home in the leaky capsule without most of its coolant.
Last week, Sergei Krikalev, head of Russia’s manned space programs, said the leak could have been caused by a micrometeoroid strike. But he and his NASA counterparts have left open the possibility of other culprits, such as hardware failure or the impact of a small piece of space debris.
The Dec. 14 leak prompted mission controllers in Moscow to halt the spacewalk as a live NASA webcast showed what appeared to be a flurry of snowflake-like particles streaking from the back of the Soyuz spacecraft.
The leak lasted for hours and emptied the radiator of coolant used to regulate temperatures inside the spacecraft’s crew compartment.
NASA has said that none of the ISS crew was ever in danger from the leak.
Cosmonauts Sergey Prokopyev and Dimitri Petelin, who were spacewalk-ready at the time, flew to the ISS aboard the now-defunct Soyuz MS-22 capsule, along with American astronaut Frank Rubio in the September
They were originally due to return home on the same spacecraft in March, but Krikalev and NASA’s ISS program director, Joel Montalbano, said Roscosmos would return them to Earth two to three weeks earlier if Russian space officials decide to launch an empty capsule for the crew. his recovery
Four other ISS crew members — two more from NASA, a third Russian cosmonaut and a Japanese astronaut — traveled to the ISS in October via a NASA-contracted SpaceX Crew Dragon and also they remain on board, with their capsule parked on the station.
METEOR RAIN?
The leak has upended Russia’s ISS routines for the next few weeks, forcing the suspension of all future Roscosmos spacewalks as Moscow officials focus on MS-22, a lifeboat designated for his three crew members if something goes wrong aboard the space station. .
Two American astronauts, Rubio and Josh Cassada, completed an uneventful seven-hour spacewalk Thursday to install a new solar array outside the station, NASA said.
If MS-22 is deemed unsafe to carry crew members back to Earth, another Soyuz capsule in line to carry Russia’s next crew to the station in March “would be sent unmanned to to have (a) healthy vehicle on board the station. capable of rescuing the crew,” Krikalev, Roscosmos’ executive director of human spaceflight, told reporters.
No mention was made of possibly sending a spare SpaceX Dragon for crew recovery.
Identifying the cause of the leak could inform decisions about how best to return the crew members.
The recent Geminid meteor shower initially seemed to raise the odds of a micrometeoroid strike as the source, but the leak was facing the wrong way for that to be the case, Montalbano said, although a space rock could have come from another direction.
Sending the stricken MS-22 back to Earth unrepaired with humans on board seemed an unlikely option given the vital role the cooling system plays in preventing overheating of the capsule’s crew compartment, which Montalbano and Krikalev said it was currently being ventilated with airflow allowed through an open space. hatch on the ISS.
NASA has previously said that temperatures in the capsule remain “within acceptable limits” and that a recent test of the capsule’s thrusters went without a hitch. But Krikalev added that the temperature would rise rapidly if the station’s hatch was closed.
The ISS, a science laboratory spanning the length of a football field, orbits about 250 miles (400 km) above Earth and has been continuously occupied for two decades, managed by a partnership led by the US and Russia which also includes Canada, Japan and 11 European countries.