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ISS May Have A Leak
Rio writes "The International Space Station is experiencing a slow, steady drop in air pressure, and American and Russian flight controllers are investigating possible causes of the leak. The Local 6 News report says Mission Control notified astronaut Michael Foale and cosmonaut Alexander Kaleri about the leak just before their bedtime late Monday afternoon. Mission Control first noticed the drop in pressure Jan. 1 and said the data showed a daily decline of about 2 millimeters of mercury. As of Monday, the pressure had declined a total of nine millimeters. That is equivalent to about one-quarter of a pound per square inch, said NASA spokesman James Hartsfield."
I think, although I'm not at all sure, that there are Soyuz on the ISS for emergency departure.
Banaaaana!
They don't have the same letters. One is I-I-S, the other is I-S-S.
You are a fucking moron. Thank you, thank you, thank you.
You remember correctly.
h tm
"A Soyuz capsule will always be docked at the ISS, capable of carrying two people in a medical emergency, or three people in other emergencies. A crew will take a fresh Soyuz capsule to the station every six months."
http://science.howstuffworks.com/space-station11.
A little more detail - Denver is the "mile-high city," so figure it's at around that height. Figure sea-level air pressure at 100 kPa (14.5 psi); air pressure at 1 mile is somewhere in the area of 50 kPa (7.25 psi). At a rate of 2 mm of mercury a day they only have about a year before they reach Denver pressure, though I assume they'd want to do something about it well before that....
fencepost
just a little off
Got any particular part of the station in mind, or do you want them to tape the whole thing up (thus rendering everything unusuable)? It's not like the station is just some big, empty metal tube. It's packed full of equipment.
Sealing the leak is the easy part. Finding the leak is the hard part.
Your numbers are off. Normal sea-level pressure is 760mm Hg. If they lose 2mm/day, after a year they'll only have 30mm Hg left, which, according to the Google calculator, is 0.58 PSI.
They are losing 2 mmHg daily, which is 0.03867 psi daily. Normal atmospheric pressure is 760 mmHg, and 0.5 atm is 380 mmHg. If this leak is at a constant rate (which might not be true) then it will take 190 days to get down to 0.5 atm, which is about half a year. Also, I suspect that a healthy man could be subjected to well below 0.5 atm, especially if the pressure were reduced so gradually.
Best Slashdot comment ever
Reporter: It's a lovely day for a launch, here, live at Cape Canaveral, at the lower end of the Florida Peninsula, and the purpose of today's mission is truly, really electrifying.
Other reporter: That's correct, Tom. The lion's share of this flight will be devoted to the study of the effects of weightlessness on tiny screws.
Reporter: Unbelievable, and just imagine the logistics of weightlessness. And of course, this could have literally millions of applications here on Earth -- everything from watchmaking to watch repair.
Reporter: Now let's look at the crew a little.
Other reporter: They're a colorful bunch. They've been dubbed, "The Three Musketeers". Heh heh heh.
Reporter: And we laugh legitimately. There's a mathematician, a different kind of mathematician, and a statistician.
God, your post is so ignorant that I have to wonder why you bothered composing it.
1. No "international" = no "space station".
If there hadn't been international cooperation, we wouldn't have a space station in orbit right now. Compared to the Russians, what NASA knew about space stations could be written on a postage stamp.
Lest you forget, Skylab wasn't exactly a screaming success (heck, one of its solar panels failed to deploy: you could hardly call that an auspicious start). Its longest period of occupancy was 84 days and it was deployed as one unit and nothing like as modular as the ISS.
On the other hand, Mir far outlived its operational life (and would have done so by an even greater margin if the bean counters hadn't tried to cut so many corners), and was occupied almost constantly for 15 years. During that time, docked with 31 spacecraft, 64 cargo vessels, 9 shuttle missions visited it and it was home to 125 cosmonauts/astronauts from 12 different countries. It was, of course, modular, like the ISS. Oh, and before Mir, the Russians also had the Salyut series of space stations up and running throughout the 1970s and 1980s.
When Russia came on board, the ISS gained a lot of expertise; the sort of expertise that money just can't buy. If you think you can find one person at NASA who thinks that putting up a space station as complex and as expensive as the ISS could have been done by the US alone then you're deluding yourself.
2. NASAs main partners in the ISS are Canada, ESA, Russia and Japan, but most of their modules have yet to be deployed.
There is no "British" space agency involvement in the ISS. However, there is ESA (European Space Agency, of which Britain plays a very small role) involvement in the ISS. This involvement includes the Columbus Laboratory, the Automated Transfer Vehicle, Nodes 2 and 3, the European Robotic Arm, and the Data Management System for the Russian Service Module. However, most (if not all) of these elements have yet to be deployed, so I fail to see how they can be responsible for a pressure leak when they're sitting on the ground.
The same is true for the Japanese involvement, the Japanese Experiment Module (JEM) also known as Kibo, which is currently undergoing testing at the Kennedy Space Centre prior to launch. Sorry to break it to you, but if their module isn't up there, I can't see how you can hope to "share the blame for this latest debacle" with the Japanese either.
By the way, the single biggest contractor on the ISS is Boeing. Last time I checked, Boeing was an American company.
3. A "sole space agency" is in charge. It's name is NASA.
The ISS may be international, but NASA is its lead partner. All others play second fiddle to it and that's never been in doubt. If there's someone "in charge of making sure everything [runs] right" that someone is NASA.
So that's D'oh!, D'oh! and thrice D'oh!
Seriously, if you could get off your xenophobic high horse for a second (and get some basic facts right too) then perhaps you might have a point (ie, that someone screwed up, again) albeit a rather weak one. But trying to turn this story into a "USA rules, rest of you just suck" gloat is pathetic, particularly when you're so off-base.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
I did screw up the numbers, and it is around half a year. I was working in kPa and did the conversion from 1mm Hg to kPa but forgot to double the result.
fencepost
just a little off
One atmosphere at sea level equates to 760mm of mercury. So a 2mm drop is a 0.26 percent drop in atmospheric pressure, assuming the atmospheric pressure of the ISS is set to that of sea level.
(I have no data on the standard operating atmospheric pressure of the ISS. Perhaps someone else can supply that so we can make a more direct measurement of the percentage fall.)
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
Matt Foley.
Chris Farley.
Google is your friend. Stay in school and don't do drugs.
Mission Control Alerts Station Crew to Slow Air Leak By Marcia Dunn AP Aerospace Writer posted: 08:00 pm ET 05 January 2004
Denver isn't at 50 kPa. Check a denver weather site. When i checked it was 102.5 kPa
50 kPa is more like the top of mauna kea
That was Apollo 16. The potassium enhanced OJ that they gave the crew gave them enhanced flatulence. Not a good thing in a small 3-man capsule.
The only reason we have the rights we have is that people just like us died to gain those rights. -- Cheerio Boy
The S.I. unit for pressure would be kg/(m sec**2), normally referred to as Pascal, or Pa for short. 1 mmHg ~= 133.32 Pa. 1 psi ~= 6894.8 Pa. 1 atm = 101325 Pa. 1 bar = 1e5 Pa, therefore 1 mbar = 100 Pa. Would you also like to know torr, inHg, and inH2O?
How can you tell a mathematician from an engineer? A mathematician won't use units anywhere in an equation, whereas the engineer will use 6 different units for the same thing in the same equation, just to make things interesting.
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According to Google, 9mm of mercury is 1200 Pascals, whereas 0.25psi is 1700 Pascals.
There's a movie I saw on AXN recently called "Mission to Mars" or something like that. There was a huge leak on their ship, and one of the guys squeezed some Dr Pepper out of it's packet and watched it go towards the hole.
The only problem is it was a large leak, whereas the one on the station is a slow one, and this idea may not work.
Founder of Mirror Moon - Tsukihime Game Trans
Check out this pretty detailed article on the ISS leak over on SciScoop.
Uhm, Mir means 'peace' and 'world' in Russian...
Check out this pretty detailed article on the ISS leak over on SciScoop.
It wouldn't be good to subject someone to 0.5atm on regular air (20% O2) as their brain won't be functioning right even if they are still alive.
At 10,000 feet MSL, atmospheric pressure is around 19in Hg (IIRC). At sea level, standard pressure is 29.92in Hg. Most people are starting to be affected in some way by hypoxia when in an unpressurized plane at 10,000 feet MSL - they may feel perfectly alright, but they are mentally nowhere near as sharp as they would be at sea level. Not really a good thing in the ISS.
0.5atm is the equivalent of being at around 15,000 ft MSL without supplimental oxygen. The FAA requires pilots be using oxygen at this altitude in unpressurized aircraft. Most people are showing quite obvious hypoxia at this altitude without supplimental oxygen.
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They plan around the lifeboat capacity. Even when they used to move the Soyuz between docking ports on Mir (i.e. to free up the only port that a shuttle orbiter could use) everyone had to go aboard the Soyuz for the maneuver, just in case they couldn't re-dock. If they couldn't, they'd abandon the station until another crew could be launched to re-man it.
Of course, they've always able to re-dock so far. There hasn't yet been an unscheduled abandonment of a space station.
The Soyuz-TMA spacecraft serving as the current lifeboat is the one that Foale and Kaleri were launched in. But a Soyuz has a finite shelf-life. Occasionally Russia launches a short-duration crew to bring up a new Soyuz (with fresh batteries and other supplies) and take back the old one. That's just part of sustaining the long-duration mission and its crew.
ISS has more docking ports so they don't have to juggle them like they did on Mir. (And there are no scheduled shuttle orbiter arrivals before late this year anyway.) But if they had to move the Soyuz for any reason, it would still be the same thing - all aboard and leave no one behind.
This is a procedure NASA learned from the Russians, among many things they learned from each other. Remember, when they started working together on the Shuttle-Mir dockings in the mid- to late 90's, NASA had the experience with big shuttle orbiters, but no long-duration platforms. Russia had the experience with space stations, but wasn't able to bring as much cargo up, and almost nothing (in comparison) back down. Each had what the other needed so that worked pretty well, besides all the symbolism it made for the end of the Cold War.
So, what are they going to do now? My guess is the first thing will be to close all the hatches to try to isolate and identify the module (or docking port between modules) with the leak. They have a finite supply of gas with which to repressurize the station - so this can't go forever without becoming a danger of shutting off a module. In a worst case scenario (which can't be ruled out yet but also isn't likely yet either), they'd have to abandon the station and take the Soyuz on re-entry back to Earth. So they have to look for it and try to fix it ASAP.
At any given time, if Foale is forced to make a life-and-death decision as commander, even he could initiate abandonment of the station. He was aboard Mir when the Progress collision occurred in June 1997. They had to close the hatch to the Spektr module (where all of Foale's on-orbit personal belongings were), losing that module and the power from its solar panels. He's seen worse than this. But I wouldn't be surprised if he didn't sleep well tonight.
a couple articles from 2002 when NASA figured contingency plans in the case of an emergency or budget shortfall.
here here and here
And oddly enough, that's what duct tape was made for.
Also, Duct Tape is the silvery cloth gear, Duck Tape is what you use to tape up your bird.
Yes, but you assume they knew that and that is what they meant. Its not, they just don't know any better. Similarly, "anyways" is not a word, its a bastardization of "anyway" and incorrectly used in place of it. People will argue this as well, becuase "that's what I've always heard". Yet another case where everyone is wrong.
Or at least so says this page on "Cockpit Pressurization Schedules" from the flight manual...gotta love FOIA.
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. - Aldous Huxley
PV = nRT
Pressure goes to 0.
Volume becomes essentially infinite.
Temperature probably remains about constant.
So the gas doesn't freeze, or liquify, but just disperses.
For a slow expansion of a fixed quantity of air in a confined volume (which is not at all like what is happening on the ISS), the gas would probably liquify on the walls of the container, but I doubt it would freeze: It's not cold enough, even in space. I think it would have to be within a few micro-Kelvins of absolute zero, and even then might not freeze, due to quantum uncertainty.
Space (far from the sun) is about 3 degrees Kelvin, due to the cosmic background radiation.
HCG 50a = 2MASX J11170638+5455016
11h17m06.4s +54d55m02s