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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."
the movie Airplane?
FP.
Would a leak this size be visible from outside of the station? I.E. would you see a small stream of gas? And since the ISS is broken into compartments, they should be able to seal each compartment and iron the leak down to a single compartment. Then its a matter of finding the leak itself.
If my answers frighten you, stop asking scary questions.
They'll run out of air within the next couple hundred days. But that's only if they have no reserve tanks and fail to patch the leak.
Can't they shut off sections of the space station...I mean, don't they have independant life support systems in multiple modules???
It sounds kinda easy to me...find some way of sealing off a section and put the equipment in that room (if it's portable)...come back in a day...if the pressure hasn't dropped in 24 hours, you know it's not THAT module...even moreso, if it happens in more than 1 section, it might be shared systems...
I know they probably have a better way to deal with this, but isn't there multiple backups? Wouldn't this be a good use of those backups? I just don't see the concern...they have a russian capsule that can be used as an escape pod...in the worse case, they'll just leave the station for a while...
I've always been under the impression that they don't NEED anyone aboard the station to dock, but it helps...
I'm an astro-nut. If I could control where most of my taxed income went, I'd almost certainly have it tunnelled off to Air Force black projects, NASA and science education.
That being said, the ISS has long since become a turkey. It's time to cut that thing loose and build us something usefull. In particular, real telescopes that will let real science be done. This space station is nothing more than a big money black hole.
I'd much rather have a space based inferometer placed at one of the Earth's lagrange points. We could learn a lot from something like that! What are we learning from ISS? Russia has no money... nobody else will cooperate with us... people can't stay up in space for a long time (hello mir?) and our space program is woefully inadequate. Great. Billions of dollars for this? I could've told you this years ago...
Bryan
Perhaps a material science expert could comment but my experience of this sort of leak is that it tends to force a bigger hole as it goes.
I'd be worried about it hitting a tipping point and really getting nasty fast.
'There is a Light that never goes out.'
With a leak that goes at a quarter PSI/month, probably would be too much trouble. You'd probably need to turn off equipment, seal off the compartment, let the air settle for a hour or two, light the match, then watch. Oh, and you can't actually go in, or you'll create air currents that will completely mask the leak's. Even breathing would probably be plenty. So you need to do the last two stoeoesAremotely.
Check what pressure is being maintained on the ISS before you start your calculator.
What's the point of an experimental space station if not to learn about things that can happen to a space station and its inhabitants, and what to do about it? I think we can learn something from this.
:P.
Of course, provided they actually solve it
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