The rescue Soyuz spacecraft could reach the space station in February
It will be some time before backup arrives so a space station crew currently dependent on a leaky Soyuz can return home.
In case of Soyuz MS-22 spacecraft will be deemed unsafe after that cooling slope in space on December 14two NASA cosmonauts and an astronaut will have to wait until February for a backup Soyuz to arrive at International Space Station (ISS), a Russian space official said during a press conference on Thursday (December 22).
“Our next crew … was scheduled to fly in mid-March,” Sergei Krikalev, head of the Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center near Moscow, said during the live NASA press conference.
The new Soyuz on the ground planned for this crew could be launched empty to retrieve the three ISS crew members if they are indeed stranded. But Krikalev said it can only be “sent a little bit earlier … about two, three weeks earlier is the most we can do at the moment.”
In the photos: International Space Station at 20
The cause of the hole that caused the leak is still under investigation, but one idea has been ruled out: It was not part of the ongoing Geminid meteor shower, as the trajectory was in the wrong direction, Joel Montalbano, director of the NASA’s ISS program, said during the same information session.
On Sunday (Dec. 18), NASA worked with cameras on the station’s Canadarm2 robotic arm. The survey found a small hole on the MS-22, this is the likely cause of the leak, but it is still unknown how the hole came to be.
“We have some work to do with images to better understand whether it was a meteoroid strike or whether there was a hardware problem, and that work is ahead,” Montalbano said. Another possibility is a piece space junkbut Krikalev said this object would be too small to track from the ground, as the hole was only 0.8 millimeters wide.
If Russia does indeed accelerate the next Soyuz to the space station, the damaged MS-22 would return empty. “Roscosmos will plan to return the current Soyuz to orbit and collect the data so they can use it for future evaluations,” Montalbano said.
Elizabeth Howell is the co-author of “Why am I taller? (opens in a new tab)?” (ECW Press, 2022; with Canadian astronaut Dave Williams), a book about space medicine. Follow her on Twitter @howellspace (opens in a new tab). follow us on twitter @Spacedotcom (opens in a new tab) or Facebook (opens in a new tab).
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