It will likely be some time earlier than backup comes for a space station crew at present relying on a leaky Soyuz to get house.
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 mentioned throughout a press convention Thursday (Dec. 22).
“Our subsequent crew … was scheduled to fly in the course of March,” mentioned Sergei Krikalev, head of the Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Coaching Middle 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 a substitute be launched empty to retrieve the three ISS crew members if they’re certainly stranded. However Krikalev mentioned it could solely be “despatched up a bit of earlier … about two, three weeks earlier is on the most what we are able to do at this level.”
In pictures: International Space Station at 20
The reason for the opening that precipitated the leak remains to be underneath 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 incorrect course, Joel Montalbano, NASA’s ISS program supervisor, mentioned 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 doubtless explanation for the leak, however how the opening got here to be is not but recognized.
“We received some work to do with imagery to higher perceive if it was a meteoroid hit or if there was a {hardware} concern, and that work is in entrance of us,” Montalbano mentioned. One other risk is a chunk of space junk, however Krikalev mentioned such an object can be too small to trace from the bottom as the opening was solely 0.8 millimeters broad.
If Russia certainly fast-tracks the following 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 mentioned.
Elizabeth Howell is the co-author of “Why Am I Taller (opens in new tab)?” (ECW Press, 2022; with Canadian astronaut Dave Williams), a guide about space drugs. Comply with her on Twitter @howellspace (opens in new tab). Comply with us on Twitter @Spacedotcom (opens in new tab) or Facebook (opens in new tab).
