Will probably be some time earlier than backup comes for a space station crew at present relying on a leaky Soyuz to get dwelling.
Ought to the Soyuz MS-22 spacecraft be deemed unsafe after spouting coolant into space Dec. 14, two cosmonauts and a NASA astronaut might want to wait till February for a backup Soyuz to reach on the International Space Station (ISS), a Russian space official stated throughout a press convention Thursday (Dec. 22).
“Our subsequent crew … was scheduled to fly in the midst of March,” stated Sergei Krikalev, head of the Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Coaching Heart close to Moscow, in the course of the livestreamed NASA press convention.
The brand new Soyuz on the bottom deliberate for that crew may as an alternative be launched empty to retrieve the three ISS crew members if they’re certainly stranded. However Krikalev stated it could possibly solely be “despatched up slightly earlier … about two, three weeks earlier is on the most what we will do at this level.”
In photographs: International Space Station at 20
The reason for the outlet that induced the leak continues to be below investigation, however one concept has been dominated out: it was not a part of the continued Geminid meteor bathe, because the trajectory was within the fallacious path, Joel Montalbano, NASA’s ISS program supervisor, stated during the same briefing.
On Sunday (Dec. 18), NASA labored with cameras on the station’s Canadarm2 robotic arm. The survey discovered a small hole within the MS-22 that’s the possible explanation for the leak, however how the outlet got here to be is not but identified.
“We bought some work to do with imagery to raised perceive if it was a meteoroid hit or if there was a {hardware} concern, and that work is in entrance of us,” Montalbano stated. One other chance is a bit of space junk, however Krikalev stated such an object can be too small to trace from the bottom as the outlet was solely 0.8 millimeters broad.
If Russia certainly fast-tracks the subsequent Soyuz to the space station, the broken MS-22 would come again empty. “Roscosmos would plan to return the present Soyuz on orbit and acquire the information to allow them to use that for future evaluations,” Montalbano stated.
Elizabeth Howell is the co-author of “Why Am I Taller (opens in new tab)?” (ECW Press, 2022; with Canadian astronaut Dave Williams), a e-book about space drugs. Observe her on Twitter @howellspace (opens in new tab). Observe us on Twitter @Spacedotcom (opens in new tab) or Facebook (opens in new tab).