Most of you will remember the image that some months ago must have caused some headach to the ISS Crew Management Team: a large amount of liquid flowing out from the Soyuz spacecraft while docked to the ISS.
Image Credit: NASA
Launched into orbit on September 21st, 2022, with three crewmembers: Roscosmos' Sergey Prokopyev and Dmitry Petelin with NASA’s Frank Rubio, the spacecraft suffered a damage on the external fairing that caused the whole coolant system to eject all its fluid into space. A 0.8 mm hole was found in the vehicle’s service module when cosmonauts Prokopyev and Petelin were preparing to conduct an EVA on the Russian segment of the International Space Station on Dec. 15 and controllers noticed a leak in the Soyuz MS-22 service module, causing, among the other thing, the abort of the EVA.
The ISS program had to quickly react and take an important decision which could affect the lives of all the people onboard the Space Station: in case of an emergency, all of them must have been able to abandon safely the ISS and this wouldn't be possible with a damaged spacecraft.
It was temporarily decided to use SpaceX Crew-5 as the escape vehicle in case it was needed. For example, Rubio's seat was moved from Soyuz MS-22 to Crew-5 until the next capsule docked to the ISS. A second Soyuz vehicle (MS-23) was launched uncrewed and docked autonomousle to the ISS and the crew was re-assigned to this spacecraft for re-entry while SpaceX's Crew-5 returned to its nominal operation.
Thanks to its autonomous capability, MS-22 landed on March 28, 2023, and was recovered by the ground support team.
Based on tests conducted on the spacecraft systems, temperature in the orbital and descent modules in the first days after the accident reached 30 degrees Celsius, up to 40 degrees in the service module. In January 2023, the temperature inside the capsule stabilized at 30 degrees. This temperature was judged by the Russian space agency as not critical for the crew.
But what about the cause of the damage? In December 2022, the cameras mounted onboard the European Robotic Arm and the Canadarm 2 were used to further analyze the damage and confirmed the hole in the external fairing. Furthermore, in February 2023 a similar issue was found in the Progress MS-21 cargo capsule. Both these damages are attributer to debris or micro meteoroid impacts.
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