Russia is considering a “liberation” plan to send a space shuttle to the International Space Station (ISS) to bring back three stranded crew members after their Soyuz crew capsule leaked while landing at the orbiting station.
Roscosmos and Nasa officials said at a news conference Thursday that they are continuing to investigate how the cooling line of the outer capsule’s radiator sustained a tiny puncture last week, as the two cosmonauts were preparing for a spacewalk exercise.
The vehicle, known as MS-22, began spewing its coolant into space on December 14, with dramatic images from Nasa TV showing snow-white particles pouring out from behind.
Sergei Krikalev, who leads the human space program at Russia’s Roscosmos, said the damage was being assessed.
No definitive decision has been made about the precise means of returning the crew members of the capsule back to Earth – either by launching another Soyuz to retrieve them or by the less likely option of sending them home in a leaky capsule without maximum self-cooling.
If the thermal analysis – which measures how hot it gets inside the chamber – concludes that MS-22 is not incapable of disturbed flight, then it could take off in mid-March from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in the middle of another Soyuz launch capsule and launch one. -crewed, Krikalev said.
“They’re looking at late February to launch the next Soyuz vehicle,” added Joel Montalbano, NASA’s ISS program manager, who was also on the call.
If that were the case, the injured spaceship would return to Earth without a crew.
Not before the leak in the Soyuz. In 2018, a module leak appeared in the air, which Roscosmos said could be sabotage. The astronauts used tape to seal the leak after a small loss of pressure that was not life-threatening.
MS-22 flew Russian cosmonauts Dmitry Petelin and Sergey Prokopyev, as well as Nasa astronaut Frank Rubio to the ISS in September.
There are currently seven people on the orbital station, but if MS-22 were thought to be foolproof, it would mean that even the ISS could only carry one “spacecraft” that could carry four people if it had to leave.
Americans Josh Cassada and Nicole Mann, Japan’s Koichi Wakata and Russia’s Anna Kikina arrived aboard SpaceX Crew Dragon in October.
The cause of the damage was still unclear, Montalbano said. But it did not appear as if the Gemini meteor shower, an annual phenomenon, was at fault, since it penetrated from a different channel.
“Both the trajectory team in Houston and the trajectory team in Moscow confirmed that there were no meteor showers,” Montalbano said.
More work was still needed to determine if micrometeoroids are naturally occurring, man-made debris in orbit, or added hardware failure.
The head of Roscosmos, Yury Borisov, stated that officials have no fear for the crew’s safety in a radio broadcast on Wednesday on the Rossiya-24 TV channel.
“A temperature” [on the Soyuz MS-22 spacecraft] It stabilized and did not exceed 30C recently. Today, we are not afraid, especially for the lives of the crew on the ISS,” he said. “The weather has settled after we brought the leadership there from the Russian segment, and we are keeping the temperature controlled by the ventilators.”
Space for the solar station upgrade that took place on Wednesday and Thursday has been extended.
Reuters and Agence France-Presse contributed to this report
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