The search for an air leak aboard the International Space Station should be almost over.
NASA announced on Tuesday September 30th that it had successfully isolated the location of the leak in the main work area of the Russian Zvezda service module. More work is in progress to find the exact location so it can be finally repaired.
The space agency was concerned to point out that the leak, first discovered 12 months ago, posed no risk to the three astronauts on board the ISS or to the integrity of the space station itself. However, a recent spike in the leak rate prompted NASA and its Russian counterpart Roscosmos to make more concerted efforts to track down the root cause of the problem.
The work, which has been on two weekends over the past five weeks, involved sending the ISS's current residents – Chris Cassidy of NASA and Ivan Vagner of Roscosmos and Anatoly Ivanishin – to isolate themselves in a specific section of the outpost with it Specialists on the ground could perform pressure tests throughout the station.
Both attempts failed to find the cause of the leak, most likely because the safe room the astronauts waited in during the pressurization tests is exactly where the leak has now been identified – the Zvezda service module.
The groundbreaking discovery came late Monday after ground controllers believed the air leak was suddenly getting bigger, although it turned out to be not. The incident prompted air traffic controllers to wake the three astronauts and ask them to conduct urgent searches using ultrasonic leak detectors. At that point the leak was attributed to the Russian module.
"Throughout the night, US and Russian specialists took pressure measurements to try to isolate the source of the leak," NASA said in a report on the incident. "By analyzing the soil of the modules tested overnight, the leak was isolated from the main work area of the Zvezda service module."
Once the controls were completed, the crew reopened the hatches between the US and Russian segments and resumed regular activities.
With October being a busy month for cargo and crew arrivals, NASA and Roscosmos specialists are hoping to finally fix the air leak in the coming days.
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