Astronauts find location of small leak in International Space Station – IT Pro – News

Astronauts in the International Space Station have discovered the location where there has been a leak for some time. This is contained in the Russian Zvezda module of the space station. The station has been leaking air for almost a few weeks, but it has never put the astronauts in danger.

The leak is, according to the Russian space agency Roscosmos the working part of Zvezda, that 20-year-old module is the third oldest on the International Space Station. Zvezda includes systems to keep the astronauts alive, although they are not the only ones life support-systems on board the station. Several weeks ago discovered a small leak when more air was leaking from the space station than usual, but it was not known where it was.

The US space agency NASA now says that the leak seems to be getting bigger in recent days. Astronauts Chris Cassidy and cosmonauts Anatoly Ivanishin and Ivan Vagner have therefore conducted experiments and collected data in various Russian modules. The American, Japanese and European modules have already been studied previously. The leak itself has still not been found, so no repair can be carried out yet.

The leak is said to have grown, but is not yet a threat to the astronauts. NASA says the temperature in the station dropped suddenly earlier this week, although the drop in air pressure in the station remained the same. It is not the first time that there has been a leak in the space station. In 2018 there was also already air to leak from the space station. The hole was not in the space station itself, but in an attached Soyuz capsule with which the astronauts had to return to Earth. The cause of that gap is still unknown.