Following a leak, Russia will deploy a "rescue" ship to the ISS

 January 12, 2023 3:53 PM

The mission will replace a damaged Soyuz capsule.

Particles are sent into space by the MS-22 Soyuz capsule's cooling loop.

                            Following a coolant leak on a Soyuz capsule docked with the International Space Station, Russia is preparing a "rescue" mission. In a media conference, NASA said that on February 20th, Russia's Roscosmos agency will deploy an empty Soyuz to the station in place of the damaged spacecraft. The launch of the vehicle was initially scheduled for March.

A return to Earth without a crew is anticipated for the leaking capsule sometime in March. Even so, it will still include other cargo and experiments. Instead of departing in March as originally scheduled, NASA astronaut Frank Rubio and the cosmonauts Dmitriy Petelin and Sergey Prokopyev will now stay in orbit for several more months.

On December 14th, the impacted ship began to shower particles. Investigators eventually concluded that a micrometeoroid impacted the exterior radiator cooling loop, which was swiftly identified by the ISS team as the culprit. Roscosmos quickly came to the conclusion that the Soyuz was too risky to employ for a typical crew return. On reentry, temperatures would have risen over 100F, endangering both the people within and the computers themselves. According to Sergei Krikalev of the agency, an in-space repair would not be feasible since the process would be too challenging.

The ISS crew is still prepared to escape in an emergency using the damaged Soyuz. That's not ideal, though, because three of the seven astronauts on board the ISS would probably have to take significant risks in order to return home. There is also a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule docked, although it only has enough for four people. Joel Montalbano, the director of NASA's ISS programme, said at the briefing that there had been discussions with SpaceX about the possibility of one of the Soyuz passengers travelling on the Crew Dragon in an emergency.

Following Russia's invasion of Ukraine, ties between NASA and Roscomos are strained. In order to work on its own space station, Russia announced last summer that it would leave the ISS after 2024. The US has been preparing for a potential Russian withdrawal since 2021. The capsule leak has, however, effectively pushed the two to collaborate closely, if only momentarily.