Russian spacecraft may have suffered micrometeorite impact-official
2022.12.15 19:44
Russian spacecraft may have suffered micrometeorite impact-official
By Ray Johnson
Budrigannews.com – A senior Russian space official stated on Thursday that a tiny meteoroid strike could have been the cause of a coolant leak that lasted for at least three hours on a Russian Soyuz space capsule that was docked to the International Space Station on Wednesday night.
NASA and Roscosmos, Russia’s space agency, said the leak did not put any astronauts in danger. Mission control in Moscow had to call off a planned spacewalk by two cosmonauts because fluid was spraying into space, as seen on live video during a NASA webcast.
“A micrometeoroid hitting the ship’s radiator could be the cause of the leak in Soyuz MS-22,” Roscosmos’ head of human spaceflight, Sergei Krikalev, said in a Telegram statement.
Space rocks known as micrometeoroids, which are typically as small as a grain of sand, are a common occurrence in space. They move randomly through the solar system and typically do little or no significant damage to the International Space Station and other advanced shielded spacecraft.
NASA stated that around 7:45 p.m. Eastern time (0045 GMT Thursday), leaky fluid spewed from a radiator cooling loop on the exterior of Russia’s Soyuz MS-22 spacecraft. Russian officials are leading the investigation into the cause of the leak. On the capsule, the liquid coolant is used to control the temperature.
The temperatures of MS-22 “remain within acceptable limits,” according to NASA. Roscosmos and the U.S. space agency didn’t say what the spacecraft’s temperature range was, how close it was to those limits, how much coolant leaked, or when the leak stopped.
In September, the same Soyuz spacecraft carried NASA astronaut Frank Rubio and cosmonauts Sergey Prokopyev and Dimitri Petelin to the space station. This was the first joint flight between the United States and Russia under a new agreement between NASA and Roscosmos that allows crews to travel together to and from the space station. When the coolant leak began, Prokopyev and Petelin were preparing for a six-hour spacewalk.
Seven people currently work on the crew of the space station, a laboratory the size of a football field that has been home to astronauts continuously for more than two decades. In October, four additional members of the most recent expedition boarded a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule to arrive. One cosmonaut, two NASA astronauts, and a Japanese astronaut make up that crew.
The leak immediately raised concerns regarding whether MS-22’s three crew members will be able to return to Earth in March 2023 as originally planned or whether NASA and Roscosmos will need to implement contingency plans.
Due to defective cooling pumps in the spacesuits of the cosmonauts, the Wednesday night spacewalk was previously postponed in late November. Additionally, in August, a battery issue with one of the cosmonauts’ spacesuits caused a Russian spacewalk to be postponed.
