That spacecraft may very well be able to fly up with none folks on board someday in February, a couple of weeks earlier than the crew is about to return in March, officers mentioned.
The crew that might fly dwelling on the rescue craft would come with NASA astronaut Frank Rubio and a pair of cosmonauts, Sergey Prokopyev and Dmitri Petelin, who arrived on the station in September.
On Dec. 14, as a pair of cosmonauts had been making ready to exit the station for a spacewalk, floor controllers at Roscosmos and NASA detected a leak of coolant gushing controllably from the Soyuz capsule.
Roscosmos shortly canceled the spacewalk. And after inspecting the car with the station’s robotic arm, they decided the leak was from an exterior cooling line used to maintain the capsule at a cushty temperature because it transports crews via the environment into the vacuum of house.
In an announcement final week, NASA mentioned that “not one of the crew members aboard the station was at risk, and all carried out regular operations all through the day.” It added that, “pictures and knowledge are being analyzed by Roscosmos. The company is also carefully monitoring Soyuz spacecraft temperatures, which stay inside acceptable limits. NASA and Roscosmos are persevering with to work collectively on a plan of action following the continuing evaluation.”
Not one of the coolant contaminated the house station, mentioned Joel Montalbano, NASA’s house station supervisor, and the astronauts on the station proceed to conduct science experiments, together with rising tomatoes.
It isn’t clear what prompted the leak. Montalbano mentioned attainable causes being investigated are a failure of {hardware} on the craft or attainable harm from a bit of particles or a micro meteorite.
On Wednesday, NASA canceled a spacewalk to put in an upgraded photo voltaic array as a result of a bit of particles was anticipated to come back inside a quarter-mile of the station. Crews maneuvered the station to keep away from the particles, and the spacewalk was rescheduled for Thursday.
