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Astronauts on the ISS brace for emergency evacuation after NASA finds 50 'areas of concern'
NASA has raised the threat level to the highest rating
NASA astronauts aboard the International Space Station are preparing for a possible evacuation as they face a worsening air leak problem.
The US space agency and its Russian counterpart, Roscomos, are tracking 50 'areas of concern' related to a growing leak aboard the station.
In a recent report from NASA's Office of the Inspector General (OIG), the cracks in a Russian service module have reached a 'top safety risk,' marking it a five-out-of-five threat level.
This story is the only one I can find. Can someone please corroborate this?
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Astronauts on the ISS Brace for Emergency Evacuation after NASA Finds 50 'Areas of Concern'
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(Score: 2) by looorg on Tuesday October 29 2024, @05:15PM (3 children)
If they know there is a leak, it's doubling in size then why don't they locate it and seal/plug it? Wouldn't a little smoke or something be enough to have it sucked towards the leak?
(Score: 5, Insightful) by quietus on Tuesday October 29 2024, @06:13PM
They originally used an ultrasonic noise detector to detect the escaping air, then tried to plug it with kapton tape; now they seem to suspect brittleness/stresses within the Pfk section -- a vestibule between the actual docking station and the rest of the Zvezda module. (If you've ever owned an Alfa Romeo with a roof window you might sympathize: the sealing rubber around that window grows brittle with time, causing leaks.)
Note that the ISS is not completely airtight, but continuously loses tiny amounts of gas to space: which is why it is regularly repressurized using nitrogen tanks brought up by cargo spacecraft.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by VLM on Tuesday October 29 2024, @07:11PM
Your stereotypical car engine has a mass air flow sensor in the intake and "uh maybe 5 grams/sec" is reasonable at idle. Not for a giant bus or an ocean ship, but a little car, sure. If you figure a g/s is about a hundred kilo/day (to about one sig fig) that means an idling car engine pumps about "five hundred" kilos/day of air. So this leak is about 1/500th the air flow out of a car muffler at idle. I don't think I could detect that. Maybe if REALLY well insulated you'd see it get slightly cooler there, but probably not.
Let's check my crazy math. 500 kilos of water, is 132 gallons. Figure a 15:1 air:fuel ratio and if cars burned water and gas that would be "ten-ish" gallons of gas burned per day at idle. Plausible.
So yeah the leak is about a thousandth the feel you get of air blowing out of your muffler when a car idles.
Another idea, probably not right. probably not entirely wrong, could be some kind of intermittent leak. Lets say you have double thickness windows (to make the explanation really simple) and the inside window "sunrise" side leaks when it heats up at sunrise and the outside window "sunset" side only leaks at sunset. Old seals, thermal expansion and contraction, etc. So its like a pump, filling the space between windows with air and dumping it out once every orbit, but it never leaks continuously. Maybe a simpler more realistic example is some random cooling fan bolted to the wall runs one minute every hour and it only leaks when it vibrates... would instruments be sensitive enough to detect the pattern? I am not sure.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 30 2024, @09:55AM
They forgot to bring the duct-tape last time.