The rescue Soyuz spacecraft could reach the space station in February
It will be some time before backup arrives for a space station crew currently dependent on a leaky Soyuz to get home.
Has the Soyuz MS-22 spacecraft is considered unsafe thereafter spraying coolant into space December 14two cosmonauts and a NASA astronaut will have to wait until February for a backup Soyuz to arrive at the International Space Station (ISS), a Russian space official said at a news conference on Thursday (Dec. 22).
“Our next crew … would fly in mid-March,” Sergei Krikalev, chief of the Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center near Moscow, said during the live-streamed NASA press conference.
The new ground-based Soyuz planned for that crew could instead launch empty to pick up the three ISS crew if they are indeed stranded. But Krikalev said it can only be shipped “a little sooner … about two, three weeks earlier is the maximum we can do at the moment”.
In photos: International Space Station at 20
The source of the hole that caused the leak is still under investigation, but one idea has been ruled out: It wasn’t part of the ongoing Geminid meteor shower, because its trajectory went in the wrong direction, Joel Montalbano, NASA’s ISS program manager, said. during the same briefing.
On Sunday (Dec. 18), NASA worked with cameras on the station’s Canadarm2 robotic arm. Found the survey a small hole in the MS-22 that is the likely cause of the leak, but how the hole originated is not yet known.
“We have some work to do with imagery to better understand if it was a meteoroid hit or if there was a hardware problem, and that work is ahead of us,” Montalbano said. Another possibility is a piece space junkbut Krikalev said such an object would be too small to track from the ground, as the hole was only 0.8 millimeters wide.
If Russia indeed accelerates the next Soyuz to the space station, the damaged MS-22 would come back empty. “Roscosmos would plan to return the current Soyuz to orbit and collect the data so they can use it for future evaluations,” Montalbano said.
Elizabeth Howell is the co-author of “Why am I taller (opens in new tab)(ECW Press, 2022; with Canadian astronaut Dave Williams), a space medicine book. Follow her on Twitter @howellspace (opens in new tab). follow us on twitter @Spacedotcom (opens in new tab) or Facebook (opens in new tab).
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