Space Station leak found to be 'done by a human hand'
Meteorologist/Science Writer
Tuesday, September 4, 2018, 11:15 PM - A tiny leak on the Space Station, which was venting air into space Wednesday and Thursday, has been repaired, but now there is some speculation about what caused it.
This story has been updated.
The six crew members on board the International Space Station awoke to some news you never want to hear when you're hurtling through space at nearly 30,000 km/h - while they slept on Wednesday night, NASA controllers on the ground had detected a small leak in part of the station, as air slowly vented into space.
The leak was determined not to be an immediate threat, otherwise the crew would have been awakened immediately, however, as soon as they woke for their normal daily routine on Thursday, they learned of the problem and set about locating the source of the leak, with the help of both Mission Control in Houston, and the Russian Mission Control Center outside Moscow.
According to NASA's Space Station blog:
The leak has been isolated to a hole about two millimeters in diameter in the orbital compartment, or upper section, of the Soyuz MS-09 spacecraft attached to the Rassvet module of the Russian segment. This is a section of the Soyuz that does not return to Earth.
The rate of the leak was slowed this morning through the temporary application of Kapton tape at the leak site. Flight controllers are working with the crew to develop a more comprehensive long-term repair.
Kapton, a special polymer film that is used as spacecraft thermal blankets, is stable across a wide range of temperatures, thus making it the perfect temporary seal to use on the space station, as it would potentially be exposed to extreme cold and extreme heat as the station orbited around Earth.
After applying the temporary solution, the crew filled the hole with resin and placed a permanent patch over it.
As this leak was not actually in part of the space station itself, but in a temporary attachment, there should not be any long-term issues from the incident.
WHAT CAUSED IT?
While there was no official word at the time about what caused this leak at the time, the first idea put forth was that the Soyuz suffered an MMOD - a micrometeoroid or orbital debris hit.
The space station has suffered damage from impacts in the past. In April of 2013, Commander Chris Hadfield tweeted out a picture from the station, showing a small "bullet hole" in one of the solar panels.
Both natural micrometeoroids (bits of rock left over from the formation of our solar system) and space debris (small pieces of spacecraft that still orbit Earth) are travelling at incredible speeds through space. Thus, when they impact the space station, they are capable of causing significant damage.
One curious aspect of the hole, though, was that there didn't seem to be any other damage to the spacecraft. If it was an impact, why wasn't there any other damage? If something pierced through the hull of the spaceship, the crew should have found another hole, or at least some damage, along the trajectory of that object. Nothing was found, however.
When pictures of the hole surfaced online, the idea of an impact was finally abandoned.
Instead, it appears as though the hole was made with a drill, either before the Soyuz launched, or after.
"We are considering all the theories," Dmitry Rogozin, the head of Russia’s Roscosmos space corporation, told TASS. "The one about a meteorite impact has been rejected because the spaceship’s hull was evidently impacted from inside. However it is too early to say definitely what happened. But, it seems to be done by a faltering hand… it is a technological error by a specialist. It was done by a human hand - there are traces of a drill sliding along the surface. We don’t reject any theories."
Though there has been some speculation about sabotage, this idea raises more questions than it answers.
For one, if the hole was supposedly made while in orbit, how could someone get into the Russian spacecraft and drill a hole without being noticed by the rest of the crew? That's very unlikely, given the cramped quarters on the station.
Also, with the station pressure closely monitored from the ground, there's no way the hole would go unnoticed.
Even if it had, the portion of the Soyuz that the hole was found in - the orbital compartment - does not return to the ground. The landing capsule separates from both the orbital compartment and the service module before the spacecraft enters the atmosphere. Then, both of those components burn up on re-entry, while the capsule descends on parachutes for a soft landing.
So, if it was an attempt at sabotage, it was an ineffectual and poorly-planned one.
The most likely scenario is that the hole was drilled accidentally, while the Soyuz was being constructed on the ground. Then, whatever was used to patch it up simply degraded over time in space, or was dislodged somehow, when the leak was noticed.
"Perhaps they filled it up with putty or did some attempt at repair but didn’t do a great job with that, and after a couple months in space, that repair thing popped out or eroded away," Harvard astrophysicist Jonathan McDowell told The Verge.
Given that temperatures on the exterior of the station and spacecraft see-saw back and forth between 121°C and -157°C, as the station orbits Earth every 90 minutes or so, if the seal wasn't perfect or the material used for the seal not perfectly rated for use in space (or a combination of both), it stands to reason that these fluctuations could easily account for the hole becoming unplugged.
This story will be updated as more information becomes available.
Source: NASA | TASS | The Verge
