NASA Astronauts Patch Leak Found On The International Space Station

It was noticed there there was a slight dip in ISS cabin pressure on Wednesday night (August 29th 2018). Yesterday, crew members traced the leak to a 2-millimeter-wide hole in one of the two Russian Soyuz spacecraft that’s currently docked to the orbiting lab.

Cosmonaut Sergey Prokopyev, the Soyuz commander, patched the hole with epoxy yesterday, and this on-orbit fix is still holding: Cabin pressure remains steady, NASA officials wrote in an update today (August 31st 2018). Flight controllers in Moscow and at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston continue to monitor pressure levels, NASA added.

With the station’s cabin pressure holding steady, most of the crew pressed ahead with a variety of scientific experiments. Station Commander Drew Feustel of NASA prepared tools to be used in a pair of spacewalks late next month to complete the change out of batteries on the port truss of the outpost. Six new lithium-ion batteries will be transported to the station in September on the Japanese HTV Transfer Vehicle, or HTV-7 cargo craft, that will replace a dozen older nickel-hydrogen batteries in a duplication of work conducted last year on the station’s starboard truss.

Flight controllers at the Mission Control Centers in Houston and Moscow, meanwhile, continued to monitor pressure levels on the station following the patching of a small hole Thursday in the orbital module, or upper portion of the Soyuz MS-09 spacecraft. The Soyuz is docked to the Rassvet module on the Earth-facing side of the Russian segment. The tiny hole created a slight loss in pressure late Wednesday and early Thursday before it was repaired by Soyuz commander Sergey Prokopyev of Roscosmos.

The crew plans a quiet weekend before embarking on a busy schedule of research and routine maintenance work next week.