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Russian space company Roscosmos announced Saturday that a Progress source sent to the International Space Station has lost strain on its external cooling system.
In its statement, Roscosmos said there is no risk to the seven team members aboard the orbiting laboratory. NASA also said the hatch between the Progress MS-21 vehicle and the area station was opened. Progress vessel, MS-22, safely docked in smart health.
Although Roscosmos’ initial was confusing about the depressurization event, Dmitry Strugovets, former head of the press service of the Roscosmos area agency, later clarified that it was a refrigerant leak. “All the coolant leaked,” he said via Telegram.
This is the time when Russian ships filter the cooling formula in less than two months at the station.
On December 14, 2022, as two cosmonauts prepared to perform a walk outside the space station, the nearby Soyuz MS-22 spacecraft began leaking uncontrollably from its external cooling circuit. This formula evacuates heat from the interior of the aircraft.
This Soyuz MS-22 spacecraft will bring cosmonauts Sergey Prokopyev and Dmitri Petelin, as well as NASA’s Frank Rubio, back to Earth in March. Russian engineers eventually said a micrometeorite hit the spacecraft’s external cooling circuit and deemed it harmful to return home.
In January, Roscosmos and NASA officials said a replacement Soyuz spacecraft would be introduced and docked autonomously with the station in February. The leaking Soyuz MS-22 vehicle will make an autonomous return to Earth, without equipment, likely in March.
It is not clear how directly the leaks on the Progress and Soyuz spacecraft are related. However, according to a NASA source, some initial knowledge gained from the Progress vehicle indicated a problem with the cooling formula. External cameras showed flakes moving away from the Progress vehicle (frozen refrigerant) to those noted with Soyuz MS-22.
Roscosmos said Saturday that the Progress incident “will have no effect on the station’s long-term program. “This is probably true for Progress MS-21, at least. The spacecraft has already been filled with trash and other fabrics to be removed from the station and was scheduled to depart next week, burning in Earth’s environment during reentry.
However, it is too early to draw such a conclusion for long-term missions. A critical question is what caused Saturday’s depressurization event. A momentary micrometeorite is unlikely to collide with a momentary Russian spacecraft in less than two months. This raises questions about whether the Soyuz MS-22 failure was actually a micrometeorite problem (Russia has never released photographs of the impact at the site) and perhaps rather a production defect.
Hours after Progress depressurized on Saturday, there are more questions than answers, but none of them will help NASA as it partners with Russia to continue operating the space station. These new problems with Soyuz and Progress are just two in a long line of recent problems. , adding the failed thrusters of the Nauka module in 2021, a failure of the Soyuz thruster in 2018 that forced Aleksey Ovchinin and Nick Hague to make an emergency return to Earth, or that is leaking the Soyuz vehicle.
These are the kinds of disruptions you would expect from a regional industry in Russia that relies on outdated infrastructure, outdated technology, and quality issues due to insufficient budgets.
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