Russian area specialists consider they might have situated the location of a leak on the outer shell of a Russian Soyuz capsule docked with the International Space Station (ISS).
The Russian area company Roskosmos mentioned in Moscow on Monday that the harm was in all probability localized.
Their findings are based mostly on an examination of video photos despatched from the area station. “Specialists are continuing to examine the data received,” the company mentioned. The temperature within the Soyuz-MS22 spacecraft was dropping, however was nonetheless inside the regular vary, it mentioned.
The leak on the area capsule was first seen on Thursday. In addition to the outer coating, a cooling unit was additionally broken. A collision with a micrometeorite is taken into account to be a attainable trigger. A deliberate spacewalk by two Russian cosmonauts needed to be cancelled due to the defect.
Cosmonauts Sergei Prokopyev, Dmitri Petelin and Anna Kikana are scheduled to return to Earth within the Soyuz in March. For the time being, Roskosmos and its US counterpart NASA see no hazard for the protected operation of the ISS.
Roskosmos will resolve on the capsule’s suitability for flight on the finish of December. The Interfax news company reported that the launch of the subsequent Russian spacecraft, Soyuz-MS23, was being thought of as a back-up.
