Russia is considering a “rescue” plan to send an empty spacecraft to the International Space Station (ISS) to bring home three stranded crew members after its Soyuz crew capsule leaked while docked at the orbiting outpost.
Roscosmos and NASA officials said at a news conference Thursday that they were continuing to investigate how the capsule’s external radiator coolant line suffered a small puncture last week, just as two cosmonauts were preparing for a routine spacewalk. .
The vehicle, known as MS-22, began spraying its coolant into space on December 14, with spectacular footage from NASA TV showing white snowflake-like particles shooting out of the back.
Sergei Krikalev, who heads human spaceflight programs at Russia’s Roscosmos, said damage was being assessed.
No final decision has been made on the precise means of flying the capsule crew members back to Earth, either by launching another Soyuz to retrieve them or by the seemingly less likely option of sending – them home in the leaky capsule without most of its coolant.
If a thermal analysis, which assesses how hot it will get inside the cabin, concludes the MS-22 is unfit for manned flight, a scheduled launch of another Soyuz capsule could be moved to mid-March from the Baikonur Cosmodrome and would be launched at the UN. – manned, said Krikalev.
“They’re looking at the end of February to send the next Soyuz vehicle,” added Joel Montalbano, NASA’s ISS program director, who was also on the call.
If this were the case, the damaged spacecraft would return to Earth without a crew.
It is not the first leak of the Soyuz. In 2018, the module developed an air leak, which Roscosmos said could have been sabotage. The astronauts used duct tape to seal the leak after it caused a small, non-life-threatening loss of pressure.
NASA astronaut Frank Rubio, right, with Roscosmos cosmonauts Sergey Prokopyev and Dmitri Petelin before heading to the ISS earlier this year. Photo: Dmitri Lovetsky/AP
MS-22 carried Russian cosmonauts Dmitry Petelin and Sergey Prokopyev, as well as NASA astronaut Frank Rubio, to the ISS in September.
There are currently seven people aboard the orbital outpost, but if MS-22 is deemed unfit, it would also mean the ISS only has one “lifeboat” capable of carrying four people, should it need to be evacuated
Americans Josh Cassada and Nicole Mann, Japan’s Koichi Wakata and Russia’s Anna Kikina arrived on a SpaceX Crew Dragon in October.
The cause of the damage is still unclear, Montalbano said. But the Geminid meteor shower, an annual phenomenon, did not appear to be to blame, as the hull was penetrated from a different direction.
“Both the trajectory team in Houston and the trajectory team in Moscow confirmed that it was not from the meteor shower,” Montalbano said.
More work was still needed to determine whether it was caused by natural micrometeoroids, man-made debris in orbit or a hardware failure, he added.
Roscosmos chief Yury Borisov maintained that officials did not fear for the crew’s safety in a live broadcast on the Rossiya-24 television channel on Wednesday.
“The temperature [on the Soyuz MS-22 spacecraft] it has stabilized and hasn’t gone over 30C lately. Today we have no fear, mainly about the life of the crew on the ISS,” he said. “The temperature has stabilized after we introduced air ducts from the Russian segment and we are maintaining the temperature regime using fans” .
A spacewalk to update the station’s solar arrays took place on Thursday and was postponed on Wednesday.
Reuters and Agence France-Presse contributed to this report