A Russian Soyuz crew ferry ship docked to the International Space Station spewed particles of an unknown substance, presumably coolant fluid, into space Wednesday night, forcing two Russian cosmonauts to call of a planned spacewalk as engineers on the ground scrambled to determine the source and the effects of the leak.
Mission controllers first observed the leak around 7:45 p.m. EST Wednesday (0045 GMT Thursday), according to Rob Navias, a NASA spokesperson providing commentary on NASA TV. The leak occurred as Russian cosmonauts Sergey Prokopyev and Dmitri Petelin prepared for a spacewalk to help relocate a radiator from outside of the Russian Rassvet module to the Nauka science module on the space station.
But before the cosmonauts could head outside, Russian ground controllers near Moscow noticed “significant leaking of an unknown substance from the aft portion of the Soyuz MS-22 spacecraft docked to the Rassvet module on the International space Station,” NASA said in a brief statement Wednesday night.
Navias said Russian ground teams noticed a warning tone indicating a drop in pressure in an external cooling loop on the Soyuz spacecraft when the particles were first observed streaming away from the capsule.
There are two manifolds in the Soyuz spacecraft’s single cooling loop, Navias said. It wasn’t immediately clear what impact the apparent coolant leak might have on the performance of the Soyuz spacecraft, which launched Sept. 21 from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan with Prokopyev, Petelin, and NASA astronaut Frank Rubio.
“The spacewalk has been canceled, and ground teams in Moscow are evaluating the nature of the fluid and potential impacts to the integrity of the Soyuz spacecraft,” NASA said in a statement.
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via World Space Info
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