The Russian space agency is determining if it is necessary to dispatch a rescue spacecraft to the International Space Station to retrieve two cosmonauts and a NASA astronaut, whose Soyuz capsule suffered a large coolant leak shortly after docking.
Rescue Spacecraft For Cosmonauts, NASA Astronaut
During a briefing on Thursday, the executive director of Roscosmos’s human spaceflight projects, Sergei Krikalev, stated that Roscosmos officials are collaborating with their NASA counterparts to establish whether the spacecraft is safe enough to return the crew to Earth. If not, the Russian space agency would launch a second Soyuz spacecraft on a crewed trip to collect the crew.
The spacecraft could be ready to launch without a crew somewhere in February, a few weeks before the crew is scheduled to return in March, according to authorities.
NASA astronaut Frank Rubio and two cosmonauts, Sergey Prokopyev and Dmitri Petelin, who arrived at the space station in September, would comprise the rescue craft’s crew.
Krikalev stated last week that a micrometeoroid impact could have triggered the leak. However, he and his NASA colleagues have not ruled out the potential of alternative causes, such as a hardware malfunction or a collision with a tiny piece of space debris.
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Possible Cause Of Damage
The International Space Station (ISS) announced on Wednesday that it has completed a Debris Avoidance Manoeuvre, one of three such operations so far this year. The two previous dates were June and October.
The breach on December 14 led mission controllers in Moscow to cancel a spacewalk as a dramatic live NASA webcast showed what seemed to be snowflake-like particles erupting from the Soyuz spacecraft’s rear.
The leak lasted for hours and drained the spacecraft’s radiator of the coolant necessary to regulate interior temperatures. NASA has stated that the leak never posed a threat to the ISS crew.
The crew compartment of the Russian spacecraft is currently being vented with an open hatch to the ISS. NASA has previously stated that the capsule’s temperatures are below acceptable parameters, but Krikalev noted that the temperature would swiftly increase if the hatch to the International Space Station were closed.
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