Space Station Experienced Air Leak, NASA Investigated

JAKARTA - The International Space Station (ISS) reportedly experienced an air leak in its laboratory section. The American Space Agency (NASA) immediately conducted an investigation to find out the cause of the leak.

According to a report quoted from Space, Friday, August 21, there are a number of crews currently on the ISS. They include NASA astronaut Chris Cassidy and Roscosmos cosmonaut Ivan Vagner and Anatoly Ivanishin from Russia.

They will temporarily stay in Russia's Zvezda Service Module for the weekend as mission control crews search for the source of the leak in other parts of the ISS.

"All rooms on the space station will be closed this weekend, so mission controllers can carefully monitor the air pressure in each module. This check should determine which module has a leakage rate higher than normal," said NASA representative Mark Garcia.

The leak was first discovered in September 2019, which made the air pressure on the ISS slowly decrease without being noticed by the crew there. The leakage rate is getting bigger and makes the air pressure decrease faster than before.

Unfortunately, at that time NASA had not had time to find the source of the leak because in the last few months, the crew was busy with a joint mission with SpaceX. Coupled with a number of other space missions.

Despite the leak, this problem has not been taken seriously because the ISS can still maintain air pressure inside the station. This is possible because the space station arrangement is a combination of several separate modules.

"When the room at the station is closed, we can monitor the pressure of each module to better isolate the source of the leak. That's the most effective way we have to find the leak, because it is very small. We don't know for sure if the leak occurred in the US or Russian segment, and not. will know until we can review the data from this weekend's testing, "said NASA's Dan Huot.

NASA said the ISS crew would not be short of space during this test because the Russian part of the ISS had a large enough room, and made sure that the Russian Astronaut and Cosmonaut was not in any danger. The results of the investigation will be known within the next week.

The launch team for #Artemis I is back in the firing room this week! Members of the team conducted a simulation on the procedures for cryogenic loading, or fueling the @NASA_SLS rocket with super cold propellants: https://t.co/0oqGVyXOl3 pic.twitter.com/7YhckjiLZS

- NASA's Kennedy Space Center (@NASAKennedy) August 20, 2020

However, tracking such leaks was a challenge for the crew due to fluctuations in normal air pressure inside the space station. Apart from normal leakage rates, the pressure also changes due to temperature fluctuations, as well as daily operation of the station.

This is not the first time that the ISS has experienced a leak, one of the biggest occurred in 2018. At that time, astronauts on the ISS discovered a small hole from the Russian Soyuz capsule that was attached to the ISS.

Leaks do pop up from time to time on the ISS, but one leak in 2018 received more attention than another. At that time according to The Verge, astronauts tracked the leak on the ISS to a small hole inside a Russian Soyuz capsule that was visiting the ISS.

Various conspiracy theories emerged at that time, some of which said that the hole was intentionally made by someone at the ISS. Roscosmos Director Dmitry Rogozin later issued a statement that the Russians already knew how the hole could exist, but they refused to disclose the information to the public.