NASA has reduced the source of leaks in 2 areas on the space station

• NASA is searching for the source of the leak on the International Space Station.
• The agency has tested most of the stations but still could not find the source.
• That means the leak is potentially in one of the two sections when crew members stopped while conducting tests.
• One of them, the Zvezda service module, provides life support for the Russian side of the station.
• Engineers are looking at how they can test the rest.
• Visit Business Insider’s homepage for more stories.

The International Space Station has been leaking for more than a year.

While the station is constantly losing some air, officials first saw an increase in that airflow in September. At the time, the leak was not major, but this summer, officials noticed a higher-than-normal rate of increase.

So in late August, three crew members aboard the station – NASA astronauts Chris Cassidy and Roscosmos cosmonauts Anatoly Ivanishin and Evan Wagner – were hunted down in one module of the station and the others were sealed off. After closing the hatch, they performed leak tests on each section.

But their data does not reveal leaks in those sections.

It leaves only two modules that could be leaked: the crew didn’t test because they were inside them while monitoring the rest of the station. There is a Zvezda service module, which provides life support for the Russian side of the station. Another Poisk is the Mini-Research Module 2, which serves as a port for docking spaceships and prepares space crew members for spaceships.

“With the crew living and working in these modules, it was impossible to achieve the environmental conditions required for this test,” NASA spokesman Daniel Hoot told Business Insider.

Russia’s space agencies NASA and Roscosmos are working to identify a “window of opportunity” to test the remaining modules for leaks, he added – either finding a way to safely separate untested modules for crew members, or sealing sections off using a special detector. No need.

“The crew is not at risk and the space station has enough consumers to operate and maintain the marginal environment,” Hoot said.

The consumer, in this case, refers to the inhaled air.

There is not a single life-support module at Zvezda station

The leak found a year ago was not considered major by NASA. Also, other priorities, such as spacewalks and crew exchanges, kept the agency and the ISS crew very busy collecting enough data about the problem.

But once the leak rate increased, the agency decided it was time to do something about it, because if the leak was to get bigger quickly, the pressurized air-supply tanks, which NASA sends to the ISS on a replacement mission, would not be enough. .

The Zwedda module, launched in 2000, was the first living part of the space station in orbit. It provides the Russian half station with oxygen oxygen and potable water, and is equipped with a machine that scrubs carbon dioxide from the air. The module also includes the department’s sleeping quarters, dining room, refrigerator-freezer and bathroom.

However, Zvezda is not the only department of the circulatory laboratory that provides life support. The station’s U.S. generators, including a kitchen generator and a kitchen and potable-water systems. The side has a separate, fully functional life-support system of its own. So theoretically, crew members would be able to do more tests in the U.S. Can stay on the side.

The problem, however, is that the Zvezda connects directly to the Soyuz spacecraft that is currently connected to the ISS. It is a ship that uses astronauts and cosmonauts to return to Earth. Closing the module’s hatches and testing them for leaks will make it difficult for Evanshin, Cassidy and Wagner to quickly enter the Soyuz in case of an emergency, if they have to go fast.

However, there is a slim chance that something was missed in previous leak tests. So on Thursday, crew members used an ultra-sonic leak detector to inspect some windows, valves and seals in previously tested modules, just in case.

This device measures the noise caused by “stormy airflow” – in this case, an air leak that is too quiet for humans to hear.

The crew tested the windows on the US side of the Kibo section, as well as many other windows on the Russian side. Engineers on Earth will then analyze the data in the coming days.

Not the first leak on the International Space Station

This is not the first leak from the Russian side of the space station, nor the most frightening. In August 2018, crew members discovered a 2-millimeter drill hole in part of the Russian Soyuz MS-09 spaceship, which was docked at the station at the time.

The hole appeared to indicate a product defect – it looked as if someone on Earth had tried to plug the hole with paint, but the paint exploded after arriving at the Soyuz space station.

So in December 2018, two cosmonauts donated a spacesuit and went out of the Soyuz ship to study the hole in detail. They spent about eight hours hacking on the insulation with a knife to find and document it.

After that, the crew successfully patched the hole with epoxy sealant.

Roscosmos has since remained fairly quiet about the incident.

“We know exactly what happened, but we won’t tell you anything,” said Dmitry Rogozin, head of Roscosmos, at a youth science conference in September 2019, according to Russia’s state news agency RIA Novosti.