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1 year ago
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The Russian abstraction bureau is deciding whether it needs to nonstop a rescue spacecraft to the International Space Station to bring location 2 cosmonauts and a NASA astronaut aft the Soyuz capsule that brought them determination suffered a monolithic coolant leak.
Working with their counterparts astatine NASA, officials astatine Roscosmos, the Russian abstraction agency, are trying to find if the conveyance is dependable capable to bring the unit home, Sergei Krikalev, the enforcement manager of Roscosmos’s quality spaceflight programs, said during a briefing Thursday. If not, the Russian bureau would nonstop up different Soyuz spacecraft that was to beryllium utilized for different crewed ngo to retrieve the crew.
That spacecraft could beryllium acceptable to alert up without immoderate radical connected committee sometime successful February, a fewer weeks earlier the unit is acceptable to instrumentality successful March, officials said.
The unit that would alert location connected the rescue trade would see NASA astronaut Frank Rubio and a brace of cosmonauts, Sergey Prokopyev and Dmitri Petelin, who arrived astatine the presumption successful September.
On Dec. 14, arsenic a brace of cosmonauts were preparing to exit the presumption for a spacewalk, crushed controllers astatine Roscosmos and NASA detected a leak of coolant gushing controllably from the Soyuz capsule.
Roscosmos rapidly canceled the spacewalk. And aft inspecting the conveyance with the station’s robotic arm, they determined the leak was from an outer cooling enactment utilized to support the capsule astatine a comfy somesthesia arsenic it transports crews done the ambiance into the vacuum of space.
In a connection past week, NASA said that “none of the unit members aboard the presumption was successful danger, and each conducted mean operations passim the day.” It added that, “images and information are being analyzed by Roscosmos. The bureau besides is intimately monitoring Soyuz spacecraft temperatures, which stay wrong acceptable limits. NASA and Roscosmos are continuing to enactment unneurotic connected a people of enactment pursuing the ongoing analysis.”
None of the coolant contaminated the abstraction station, said Joel Montalbano, NASA’s abstraction presumption manager, and the astronauts connected the presumption proceed to behaviour subject experiments, including increasing tomatoes.
It is not wide what caused the leak. Montalbano said imaginable causes being investigated are a nonaccomplishment of hardware connected the trade oregon imaginable harm from a portion of debris oregon a micro meteorite.
On Wednesday, NASA canceled a spacewalk to instal an upgraded star array due to the fact that a portion of debris was expected to travel wrong a quarter-mile of the station. Crews maneuvered the presumption to debar the debris, and the spacewalk was rescheduled for Thursday.
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