TIME.CO, Jakarta – Routine activity of walking in space or space walk by two Russian cosmonauts aboard the International Space Station (ISS) was canceled due to a stream of liquid leaking from the docked Soyuz spacecraft, NASA reported on Thursday, Dec. 15, 2022.
The plume, which was seen in NASA’s video feed as an explosion of snowflake-like particles emanating from the rear of Soyuz MS-22, was described by NASA as a coolant leak.
NASA said none of the seven current International Space Station (ISS) crew members – three Russian cosmonauts, three US NASA astronauts and one Japanese astronaut – were in danger.
The accident happened just like two cosmonautCrew Commander Sergey Prokopyev and Flight Engineer Dimitri Petelin, prepare for a planned spacewalk to move radiators from one module to another on the Russian ISS segment.
A Russian mission control operations official near Moscow can be heard informing Prokopyev and Petelin in a radio broadcast that their spacewalk has been canceled as engineers work to determine the nature and origin of the leak.
NASA commentator on the live stream, Rob Navias, broadcast from NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, also said the spacewalk was canceled due to the leak, which he said started around 7:45pm. EAST.
Navias said the Soyuz vessel arrived at the space station in September, carrying Prokopyev, Petelin and US astronaut Frank Rubio to the ISS, and remained attached to the laboratory side of the Earth-facing orbit.
The spacewalk scheduled for Wednesday was postponed to late November due to a damaged coolant pump in the cosmonaut’s spacesuit, Navias said.
The spacewalk will be the 12th this year on the ISS and the 257th in the platform’s 22-year history for assembly, maintenance and upgrade work, according to NASA.
Navias said it is too early to know what implications the loss could have for the integrity of the spacecraft and whether it could create difficulties in returning the crew to Earth at the end of the mission.
Five other spacecraft are parked at the space station: two SpaceX capsules (Crew Dragon and Cargo Dragon), a Northrop Grumman Cygnus cargo spacecraft, and two Russian supply ships, Progress 81 and Progress 82.
ISSwhich stretches the length of a football field and orbits about 250 miles above the Earth, which it has occupied since 2000, is operated by a partnership led by the United States and Russia that includes Canada, Japan and 11 European countries.
