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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."
Damn Slashdot... I was about to come out in my penguin outfit to show my Linux Pride.
/^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/i
Two spoons, chalk, washing up bowl, rubber patch, glue.
Well, either they'll find out what went bump last November, or everyone will die and we'll be subjected to another Tom Hanks space movie.
they have duct tape, right? If they don't they'll REALLY be in trouble.
Esoteric reference.
They say "There are no immediate concerns for the safety or health of the crew", but what are they doing about it?
When is it time to take action?
Do they have a way to leave?
They have a supply of Oxygen and Nitrogen to repressurize the station, but how long will that last?
It would be nice to sit in on the decision-making, just to observe...
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just before their bedtime late Monday afternoon
Astronauts have a bedtime?!? Screw that, there's goes my plans for the future.
Just submerge it in water and look for the bubbles.
Or in this case space and look for the air.
The leak... does that suck or does that blow...?
Help save the critically endangered Blue Iguana
There's even a cargo ship that's docked to the station ... they've been testing valves all night, I'm guessing they'll wait til that Russian ship leaves, and if the leak doesn't disappear, then they'll start to get concerned.
If you assume that the more complex a seal is, the better chance it has of leaking, then the docking hardware might be a good place to start looking.
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Just light a cigarette, and follow where the smoke goes to figure out where the leak is.
Then, patch it with chewing gum, and have a beer (or shot of vodka) to celebrate the success.
They do allow cigarettes, gum, and alcohol on the ISS, don't they? Of course! All of the movie space stations do!
"Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives" should be a convenience store, not a government agency.
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.
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
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
one small use for toothpaste...
One giant leap for MacGuyver fans around the world
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.