Nasa to hunt for air leak on the International Space Station

Friday 21 August 2020 16:13

In this handout photo provided by NASA, the International Space Station is seen over a blue and white Earth

(NASA via Getty Images)

Nasa is to launch a test to try and find an air leak on the International Space Station.

The space agency has been struggling to locate the source of a tiny leak in the space station since September 2019, when it noticed that the cabin was letting out more air than would be expected.

In the months since, it has been unable to locate the problem that could be causing the small drop in pressure.

Nasa has also noticed that the rate of the depressurisation has increased, though the leak still remains within specifications.

The leak poses no risk to either the station or the people living on board. The space station can be repressurised using nitrogen tanks that are taken to the space station on cargo missions.

But Nasa hopes that isolating the problem will finally allow it to be fixed and allow the space station to return to normal operation.

The test will see the three crew members who are currently in the floating lab spend their weekend inside the Russian part of the space station.

The Zvezda service module served as the living quarters when permanent habitation of the space station began in 2000, and they will still have access to the Soyuz ship that delivered them to the ISS and will take them home.

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1/10Nasa's groundbreaking decade of space exploration: In pictures

Nasa's groundbreaking decade of space exploration: In pictures

Mystic Mountain, a pillar of gas and dust standing at three-light-years tall, bursting with jets of gas from fledgling stars buried within, was captured by Nasa's Hubble Space Telescope in February 2010

Nasa/ESA/STScI

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Arrokoth, the most distant object ever explored, pictured here on 1 January 2019 by a camera on Nasa's New Horizons spaceraft at a distance of 4.1 billion miles from Earth

Getty

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An image of the Large Magellanic Cloud galaxy seen in infrared light by the Herschel Space Observatory in January 2012. Regions of space such as this are where new stars are born from a mixture of elements and cosmic dust

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The first ever image of a black hole, captured by the Event Horizon telescope, as part of a global collaboration involving Nasa, and released on 10 April 2019. The image reveals the black hole at the centre of Messier 87, a massive galaxy in the nearby Virgo galaxy cluster. This black hole resides about 54 million light-years from Earth

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Pluto, as pictured by Nasa's New Horizons spacecraft as it flew over the dwarf planet for the first time ever in July 2015

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A coronal mass ejection as seen by the Chandra Observatory in 2019. This is the first time that Chandra has detected this phenomenon from a star other than the Sun

Nasa

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Dark, narrow, 100 meter-long streaks running downhill on the surface Mars were believed to be evidence of contemporary flowing water. It has since been suggested that they may instead be formed by flowing sand

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Morning Aurora: Nasa astronaut Scott Kelly captured this photograph of the green lights of the aurora from the International Space Station in October 2015

Nasa/Scott Kelly

All the hatches on the space station will be closed during the test, so that engineers can monitor the air pressure in each module.

That should allow them to isolate the problem module, and further investigations will allow for the potential repair of the problem.

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