When your toilet breaks at home, at least you can
call a plumber. On the International Space Station, sitting about 250 miles above the surface of the Earth, the solution is a bit more
complicated. Last week, while trying to upgrade their toilet facility,
the ISS crew accidentally caused a water leak on the station.
The toilet onboard the ISS was installed in 2008,
during one of the last Space Shuttle missions. It’s based on a design
that’s about as old as the ISS itself, so it was in need of some
improvement. The ISS astronauts were trying to install that improvement
when something went wrong.
The ISS crew were trying to install the new Universal Waste Management System, a next-gen toilet system that’s supposed to be smaller, lighter,
cleaner, and more efficient than what they have now. The UWMS will be
installed on NASA’s upcoming Orion spacecraft and the proposed lunar
space station NASA is expected to construct over the next decade.
One of the dangers of floating in a space station
is that you really have to worry about leaks. After all, there’s only a
thin metal shell standing between you and the vacuum of space, and even a
small hole can quickly prove disastrous.
That’s the reality the astronauts aboard the International Space Station awoke to yesterday,
when it was discovered that a small leak in the station was causing the
air pressure inside to drop. Fortunately, the hole was small enough
that it wasn’t life-threatening, and one of the astronauts simply plugged the hole with his finger while waiting for a more permanent fix.
Initially,
ground crews monitoring the ISS noticed the leak because of a small
drop in air pressure aboard the station while the astronauts were
sleeping. With a larger leak, the astronauts would have been woken up
right away, but this particular leak was small enough that NASA decided
it could wait until morning.
Once the astronauts
woke up, they immediately spent the first few hours hunting down the
leak. They finally located it aboard the orbital section of Soyuz spacecraft MS-09, although it’s not exactly clear what could have caused
it. The leak itself is a small hole two millimeters wide, and NASA
suspects it was caused by a small micrometeorite punching a hole in the
wall.
Looking at a photo of the hole, it looks less like a
puncture caused by a small meteorite and more like a hole that was
purposefully drilled. That's not just a layman's observation either.
Dmitry Rogozin, the Director General of Russia’s space agency Roscosmos,
suspects that the drilling was done with the intention of causing a
leak. “There were several attempts at drilling,” he said in televised comments, by a “wavering hand.”
“What is this?” he asked. “A production defect or some premeditated actions?”
This
issue is particularly important for Russia, because the leak was
located on a Russian-made Soyuz spacecraft. If that hole was drilled
during the manufacturing process, that means Russian manufacturers could
be to blame. It’s “matter of honor” for Russia and Soyuz manufacturer
Energiya, says Rogozin.
If the cause is a
production defect, then it will likely show up on tests of other Soyuz
spacecraft here on Earth. Those tests are currently underway, but it’s
also possible an employee or contractor drilled that hole either
accidentally or deliberately. In this case, the person could have sealed
the hole somehow, where it remained hidden for weeks until the vacuum
of space caused the sealant to dry up and break apart.
Still
another possibility is that the Soyuz was fine when it launched, and
the hole was drilled by someone living inside the station. Russian
cosmonaut-turned MP Maxim Surayev suspects that this could be the case,
the result of an astronaut who couldn’t deal with space life anymore.
“We're all human, and anyone might want to go home, but this method is
really low,” he said. “If a cosmonaut pulled this strange stunt—and that
can't ruled out— it's really bad.”
0 Comments