For the second time in two months, a Russian spacecraft docked with the Worldwide Area Station (ISS) has sprung a leak.
Mission controllers in Moscow have observed “a depressurization” within the robotic Progress 82 cargo craft, Russia’s federal space company Roscosmos announced on Saturday (opens in new tab) (Feb. 11).
The depressurization occurred within the Progress automobile’s coolant system, NASA officers stated.
“The explanation for the lack of coolant within the Progress 82 spacecraft is being investigated. The hatches between the Progress 82 and the station are open, and temperatures and pressures aboard the station are all regular,” NASA officers wrote in a blog post on Saturday (opens in new tab). “The crew, which was knowledgeable of the cooling loop leak, is in no hazard and persevering with with regular space station operations.”
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Progress 82 arrived on the ISS on Oct. 28, 2022 and was scheduled to depart on Feb. 17. It is unclear if the freighter will nonetheless depart on that date or if mission controllers will maintain it round longer than initially deliberate to proceed the leak investigation. (Progress automobiles are designed to deplete in Earth’s atmosphere when their missions are over, so engineers will not have the ability to study the automobile on the bottom.)
Coincidentally, the depressurization was observed on the identical day that one other Russian freighter, Progress 83, arrived on the orbiting lab. Progress 83 docked successfully early Saturday morning, unaffected by the travails of its sibling ship.
Progress 82’s leak follows on the heels of an analogous incident involving Russia’s MS-22 Soyuz spacecraft, which carried three astronauts to the International Space Station in September and was presupposed to haul them residence once more in March.
However Soyuz MS-22 leaked away all of its coolant on Dec. 14, a dramatic occasion that Russian mission controllers finally traced to an obvious micrometeoroid strike. The automobile is now unfit to hold astronauts besides in case of an emergency aboard the ISS, so Roscosmos plans to launch another Soyuz later this month to take its place.
That substitute Soyuz, often called MS-23, will launch uncrewed. It’s going to carry the MS-22 crew — cosmonauts Dmitri Petelin and Sergey Prokopyev and NASA’s Frank Rubio — again to Earth, seemingly in late September.
That is the present plan, anyway. It is unclear in the meanwhile if Roscosmos and the opposite space station companions will regulate it, maybe to permit extra time to conduct a Progress leak investigation and contemplate the implications of its outcomes.
Mike Wall is the writer of “Out There (opens in new tab)” (Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Karl Tate), a e-book in regards to the seek for alien life. Observe him on Twitter @michaeldwall (opens in new tab). Observe us @Spacedotcom (opens in new tab), Facebook (opens in new tab) and Instagram (opens in new tab).
