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A segment of the International Space Station (ISS), controlled by Russia, has been leaking for a few years now, allowing air and pressure to move out.
With the situation reaching a fever pitch, cosmonauts are scrambling to work on the problem areas, while officials from NASA and Roscosmos continue to disagree over the severity of the problem, CNN reported.
The space station having a size equal to a football field must remain pressurised and filled with breathable gases at all times so that the rotating crew of astronauts can continue to survive. It has separate but connected Russian and US sections.
In 2019, the problematic leaks were identified for the first time in a tunnel connecting Zvezda, a Russian module, to the docking port which welcomes spacecraft that carry cargo and supplies. However, this year the rate at which it is bleeding air has hit a new high.
As per the latest report by NASA’s Office of Inspector General, oversight officials in the country consider this issue as the most pressing problem that the space station faces, threatening the crew’s safety.
During a meeting on the issue on Wednesday, former NASA astronaut Bob Cabana, chair of the US space agency’s ISS Advisory Committee, noted that it has “expressed concerns about the structural integrity of the (leaking module) and the possibility of a catastrophic failure”.
Although Roscosmos has asked cosmonauts to address the problematic areas, their team “does not believe catastrophic disintegration… is realistic,” Cabana noted.
Cabana stated that the Russians believe that continued operations are safe, however, they are unable to “prove that to our satisfaction”.
“And the US believes that it’s not safe, but we can’t prove that to the Russian satisfaction,” he added.
These disagreements persist even after a meeting that took place in Russia in September this year. The US, meanwhile, is pushing for independent experts from the two sides to evaluate this issue to help them reach a consensus on the root cause.
Cabana claimed that Russia is yet to comply with the recommendation, while the US already has taken steps to create its team of experts.
At the space station, both astronauts and cosmonauts have been asked to adopt precautionary measures like keeping the leaking segment sealed off at all times, except for times when it can open to unpacking cargo from spacecraft arriving at a nearby docking port. But they have to close the hatch that separates the US and Russian portions during this time, NASA astronaut Michael Barratt said on November 8.
In a statement, NASA informed that the cracks are “very small, not visible with the naked eye and have brackets and pipelines near them, making it difficult to get diagnostic tools into these areas”. The leak rate ranges between “2 to 2.5 pounds (of air) per day above space station baseline”.
