By Joey Roulette

(Reuters) – A coolant leak lasting for at the least three hours Wednesday night time aboard a Russian Soyuz area capsule docked to the International Space Station may have been brought on by a tiny meteoroid strike, a senior Russian area official mentioned Thursday.

NASA and Russia’s area company, Roscosmos, mentioned no astronauts have been endangered by the leak, which pressured mission management officers in Moscow to name off a deliberate spacewalk by two cosmonauts as fluid sprayed outward into area, as seen on reside video throughout a NASA webcast.

“The cause of the leak in Soyuz MS-22 could be a micrometeoroid hitting the ship’s radiator,” Sergei Krikalev, head of human spaceflight at Roscosmos, mentioned in a press release posted on Telegram.

Tiny micrometeoroids, or area rocks, most of them as small as a grain of sand, are a traditional a part of the area atmosphere as they zip via the photo voltaic system in random instructions and usually trigger little or no substantive harm to the ISS and different spacecraft protected by superior shielding.

Russian officers are main an investigation into the reason for the leaky fluid, which spewed from a radiator cooling loop on the outside of Russia’s Soyuz MS-22 spacecraft beginning round 7:45 p.m. Eastern time on Wednesday (0045 GMT Thursday), NASA mentioned. The liquid coolant is used to manage temperatures on the capsule.

NASA mentioned MS-22’s temperatures “remain within acceptable limits.” Neither the U.S. area company nor Roscosmos defined the spacecraft’s temperature vary, how shut the vessel was to reaching these limits, how a lot coolant escaped or what time the leakage stopped.

The identical Soyuz spacecraft ferried cosmonauts Sergey Prokopyev and Dimitri Petelin together with NASA astronaut Frank Rubio to the area station in September, marking the primary joint U.S.-Russian flight below a renewed settlement between NASA and Roscosmos permitting commingled crews on journeys to and from the area station. Prokopyev and Petelin have been the 2 suited up for a six-hour spacewalk when the coolant leak started.

The area station, a soccer field-sized laboratory housing astronauts on a steady foundation for over twenty years, has a present crew of seven. The 4 different members of the most recent expedition arrived in October aboard a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule. That crew consists of two NASA astronauts, a Japanese astronaut and one cosmonaut.

The leak raised speedy questions on whether or not MS-22 will have the ability to return its three-man crew to Earth in March 2023 as initially deliberate, or if NASA and Roscosmos might want to pursue contingency plans.

The spacewalk deliberate for Wednesday night time was postponed as soon as earlier than, in late November, due to defective cooling pumps within the cosmonauts’ spacesuits. And in August, a Russian spacewalk was minimize brief by a battery subject with one of many cosmonauts’ spacesuits.