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Last week, a pressure leak occurred on the International Space Station. It was slow and posed no immediate threat to the crew, with the atmosphere leaving the station at a rate such that depressurization of the station would have taken 14 days.
Eventually, US and Russian crew members traced the leak to a 2mm breach in the orbital module of the Soyuz MS-09 vehicle that had flown to the space station in June. The module had carried Russian cosmonaut Sergey Prokopyev, European Space Agency astronaut Alexander Gerst, and NASA's Serena M. Auñón-Chancellor.
[...] The drama might have ended there, as it was initially presumed that the breach had been caused by a tiny bit of orbital debris. However, recent Russian news reports have shown that the problem was, in fact, a manufacturing defect. It remains unclear whether the hole was an accidental error or intentional. There is evidence that a technician saw the drilling mistake and covered the hole with glue, which prevented the problem from being detected during a vacuum test.
(Score: 2) by Aiwendil on Thursday September 06 2018, @02:20PM (5 children)
I know depletion takes time (I'm a scuba diver, so I'm used to messing with pressure differences and gases).
I mean, why does it take more than a couple of minutes. The airflow really should be quite altered (and have a strong tedency towards the hole if you released something with low mass that can suspended in air (smoke, confentti (in zero G)) by the time the pressure drop is noted, why don't they have an automated "leak locator" for such instances? It should be faily easy to make in 2.5x2.5x2.5 (ie: cube 1in sides) cubes where you just stick one each to a wall in each module.
(Score: 2) by zocalo on Thursday September 06 2018, @02:42PM
The only reason this probably made the more mainstream news outlets was that the scratches around the hole led to accusations of some form of cover-up/sabotage. Were it not for that it would probably have little more than a footnote in the ISS's business as usual coverage.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 06 2018, @03:04PM (3 children)
You simply cannot reach the walls, because most of them are completely covered by instrument racks.
If you are searching for a non-obvious leak, first you locate the correct station segment by closing the doors sequentially and watching the pressure drop (or not). Since a malfunctioning safety system could wreak immense havoc by closing inappropriate doors, this must be a purely manual process.
Then you'll be listening, feeling the airflow, perhaps also spraying locator aerosol .... and *then* you'll be pulling experiments out of their racks one after the other to look at the actual walls. This is also very highly non-automatable. Not all experiments can easily be pulled clear (lots of eletrical, thermal, liquid and gas connections there in them racks ....). During the search, you'll basically be sticking your upper body into a crammed server rack to look at its back wall :-o (No, I'm not exaggerating)
Also, automatic systems usually fail at the worst possible moment (which is not neccessarily the moment they were designed for!). A well-trained(!) human brain is still the best known resource for solving infrequent, complex, vitally important problems in uncertain environments!
(PS: I'm a cave exploration diver, which is remarkably similar to spaceflight, although less complex by several orders of magnitude)
(Score: 2) by Bot on Thursday September 06 2018, @09:24PM (1 child)
> PS: I'm a cave exploration diver, which is remarkably similar to spaceflight
this is strange. My AI would have sworn it was a porn category. Recalculating....
Account abandoned.
(Score: 2) by MostCynical on Friday September 07 2018, @12:33AM
It is a porn category, but, as with general application of Rule 34, it is also a separate category unrelated to porn.
See also "rack"/"racked"
"Wack"
"Sack"
And "stick"
:-)
(
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 08 2018, @05:14AM
This is certainly true, but with an important caveat:
Humans are the best at solving infrequent, complex problems which progress slowly enough that you have time to think about them in a calm manner.
If you have to respond in 1ms or die, the computer has to do it.
If you have to respond in 1s or die, the computer should probably do it.
If you have to respond in 30s or die, a combination is allowable but a human must mostly rely on memorized rote actions.
If you have to respond in 3 hours or die, the process should be manual but with as many scenarios studied ahead of time as possible.