This weekend NASA declared that they would thoroughly investigate a small air leakage at the International Space Station (ISS). Luckily, all three crew members aboard the space station were safe.
According to another NASA’s statement, the rate of that small air leak out of the ISS started to increase over time. Right after this news, all their team members started working on a plan to isolate, identify, and repair the source.
Space Crew of the station’s current expedition 63 decided to spend the weekend in the ISS’s orbiting laboratory in the Russian segment, inside the Zvezda service module, according to a statement released by the officials of NASA in their yesterday’s update.
This indicates that all three astronauts aboard the ISS would be working around the Zvezda module, the Poisk mini-research module, and their Soyuz MS-16 spacecraft.
After an active period, the main highlights were that SpaceX’s first crewed mission, Demo-2, docking with the ISS, NASA is taking a moderately more extended period to examine the leak. They anticipate to have a few answers by the following week, the NASA team clarifies.
“Since we have a generally good amount of time in the operations so spacewalks, vehicle traffic, additional team members would all be able to bring about changes. The crew will be closing the portals to every module so the ground can monitor every module’s pressure to isolate the source additionally,” NASA representative, Dan Huot, told Space.com
“It’s one of the best methods we have of finding the leak, as it is quite small,” he added. We don’t know precisely if the leak is in the U.S or the Russian segment, and won’t until we thoroughly examine the data from this current end of the week’s tests.”
The astronauts were freely allowed to work without wearing bodysuits inside the station during the time of the investigation. The ISS, in reality, is always leaking a little amount of air now and then, which means it requires routine depressurization from nitrogen and oxygen tanks that are usually sent up during the cargo missions. While the leak is higher than usual this time, NASA has accentuated that it won’t cause any serious problem to the crewmembers onboard.