As if you were watering the garden with a garden hose in shower mode. This is what it looked like On NASA Live Broadcast, as they were ready to report on the spacewalk outside the International Space Station. But suddenly, a leak appeared in the docked Russian spaceship Soyuz MS-22.
Large amounts of drops flew out. The coolant may be from the spacecraft that the two Russian cosmonauts and their American cosmonaut Frank Rubio brought to the International Space Station at the end of September, NASA employees speculated in a live broadcast.
Mission controllers noted a “major leak”, which was later confirmed by NASA on its web site. The cause of the leak is still unknown, but NASA says the astronauts aboard the space station are in no danger.
Work that Prokopyev and Petelin were supposed to do on the Russian Nauka module during a spacewalk has been delayed because of the leak.
Back to earth
The problem occurs on the Russian part of the International Space Station, with a Russian spaceship docked, so the Russians are responsible for analyzing the problem. They do this, among other things, by analyzing the leak site, from which the fluid is no longer visibly flowing, with European robotic arm, which is highly developed in the Netherlands. The results of this investigation have not yet been published.
Soyuz MS-22 will return Prokopyev, Petelin and Rubio to Earth on March 28, 2023. It remains to be seen if this is still safe for further research.
This isn’t the first time that problems have surfaced with the Soyuz attachment to the International Space Station. In 2018, astronauts discovered a 1.5-millimeter hole behind a toilet in the living area of the Soyuz capsule. Russia Suspected vandalism at the time, but the reason was not revealed. Since this hole was not in the part returning to Earth, the return trip with the Soyuz was not in danger at that time.
