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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 All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Thursday September 06 2018, @03:13PM
Many of your ideas are excellent. Talking out my butt as far as how you'd do it on ISS. On Earth you could make sure that you have your winds controllable (much easier to do on ISS, maybe, for anything except breathing by shutting down all fans) and then introduce something that is waftable ('clean' smoke, hyperfine talc, possibly even a rarified gas with a wand gas detector like how one chases a Freon leak) then try to chase it, although natural diffusion would make that one hard. Coupled with a visual inspection, or maybe you look for visual first then introduce your drift agent.
And eventually because it was a tiny leak. The hole was 2mm but patched with glue. Smaller the hole, less volume escapes, harder to trace.
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