Temperatures in a Russian Soyuz crew ferry ship docked at the International Space Station — a lifeboat for three of the lab's seven crew members — remain within safe limits despite a dramatic overnight leak in the spacecraft's cooling system.
The leak developed around 7:45 p.m. EST Wednesday amid preparations for a planned 6-hour and 40-minute spacewalk by cosmonauts Sergey Prokopyev and Dmitri Petelin to move a radiator from the Rassvet module, where the Soyuz MS-22/68S spacecraft is docked, to the new Nauka laboratory module.
Cosmonaut Anna Kikina, working inside the Russian Nauka lab module , uses a European-built robot arm to inspect the Soyuz MS-22 spacecraft after it sprang an apparent coolant leak, forcing Russian flight controllers to cancel an already planned spacewalk. Dec. 14, 2022.But there was no doubt a major leak was present. It continued for several hours and Russian flight controllers called off the spacewalk while engineers monitored telemetry and video.
Coolant systems are critical to all spacecraft in order to cope with a wide range of temperatures, such as when vehicles are in direct sunlight, the cold darkness of the Earth's shadow, or during re-entry. It's not yet known how much coolant, if any, might remain in the system, or how temperatures will respond to different sun angles in the station's orbit.
While NASA did not address the issue directly, the Soyuz presumably is flightworthy as is, but no other details were immediately available.
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