That spacecraft may very well be able to fly up with none folks on board someday in February, a number of weeks earlier than the crew is about to return in March, officers mentioned.
The crew that might fly residence 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.
Wayne Hale, a former NASA flight director and SpaceShuttle program supervisor, mentioned he might recall of no different time when NASA or Roscosmos had been compelled to think about sending up one other spacecraft as a lifeboat to carry again a crew.
On Dec. 14, as a pair of cosmonauts had been getting ready to exit the station for a spacewalk, floor controllers at Roscosmos and NASA detected a leak of coolant gushing from the Soyuz capsule.
Roscosmos rapidly 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 snug temperature because it transports crews by means of the ambiance into the vacuum of area.
In an announcement final week, NASA mentioned that “none of the crew members aboard the station was in danger, and all conducted normal operations throughout the day.” It added that “images and data are being analyzed by Roscosmos. The agency also is closely monitoring Soyuz spacecraft temperatures, which remain within acceptable limits. NASA and Roscosmos are continuing to work together on a course of action following the ongoing analysis.”
None of the coolant contaminated the area station, mentioned Joel Montalbano, NASA’s area station supervisor, and the astronauts on the station proceed to conduct science experiments, together with rising tomatoes.
It isn’t clear what triggered the leak. Montalbano mentioned doable causes being investigated are a failure of {hardware} on the craft or doable injury from a chunk 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 chunk 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.