You think your day was bad and everything went wrong? Well you¡¯ve got nothing on the astronauts aboard the International Space Station. Oh nothing, they just had to act to avoid danger out in the vast, lonely expanse of space.
Images courtesy: NASA
Earlier on Thursday, the astronauts on board woke up to a call that the space station was slowly leaking air. Flight controllers on the ground had been monitoring the slow pressure drop overnight, and decided that it wasn¡¯t enough of a probleem to wake the crew over. The astronauts, Drew Feustel, Ricky Arnold, Serena Au?¨®n-Chancellor, Alexander Gerst, Oleg Artemyev and Sergey Prokopyev eventually found the leak.?
As it turns out, air was leaking from the Soyuz MS-09 spacecraft attached to the Russian side of the station, after it ferried the crew of Expedition 56 to the ISS in June. It didn¡¯t seem to be an immediate danger to the crew, but of course it still had to be found and fixed before the station gradually ran out of air.
When they finally located the hole, it turned out to be a 2 mm puncture in the orbital compartment of the spacecraft. So, in a bid to avoid any more air to escape while the tools for repair were assembled, astronaut Alexander Gerst from the ESA just stuck his thumb into it.
Of course, a thumb isn¡¯t exactly the best way to repair a problem in a mission critical and very expensive piece of space hardware, but it was just a temporary measure. In the meantime, his fellow astronauts gathered epoxy and Kapton (a durable type of tape used on space missions), and plugged the hole for real. That is once again just a slightly less temporary fix until the hole can be repaired in proper.
Systems on board the ISS have since been stabilized, and Russian space agency Roscosmos is investigating the cause of the puncture.
One small thumb for an astronaut, one giant save for the ISS.