Two astronauts, Chris Cassidy and Tom Mashburn, aboard the International Space Station have started preparing for a spacewalk to fix a leak discovered in the spaceship’s cooling system, NASA said yesterday.
Mission managers spent the day yesterday reviewing data on the leak, which is located on the station’s far port truss (P6), and whether to conduct a spacewalk to investigate the leak, the agency said.
“Tomorrow we send two crew out into the thermal vacuum wearing cloth-and-rubber pressure suits to repair ISS,” Station Commander Chris Hadfield of Canada tweeted on Friday. “Extra study of procedures tonight.” The spacewalk is to take place early morning today, news reports said quoting NASA officials.
Station program manager Michael Suffredini described it as a “serious situation,” but told a news conference if the cooling system cannot be fixed Saturday, it can be fixed in later spacewalks.
The US space agency said in a statement that the leak posed no danger to the six-member crew aboard the ISS, which is orbiting about 410 kilometres away from Earth. The crew was alerted to the leak when it noticed floating white ammonia, which runs in loops to cool the spacecraft’s electricity supply system.
Suffredini said the likely cause of the leak was space junk hitting a cooling tube, but he added that the area had a slow, small leak for many years.
The station is operating normally, the agency’s statement said.
In November, two astronauts stepped out of the spacecraft to fix a similar ammonia leak.