On the Soyuz ship, the thermal control system was torn apart: they started talking about a collision with a meteorite

Russian cosmonauts again unable to go into outer space because of the state of emergency

Roskosmos on Thursday once again canceled the extravehicular activity (EVA) of cosmonauts Sergei Prokopiev and Dmitry Petelin. If on November 25 this happened due to damage to the cooling system of Prokopiev’s spacesuit, now, judging by the NASA press service, the thermal supply system of the Soyuz spacecraft docked to the ISS has ruptured. Judging by the cosmonauts’ conversations with the Mission Control Center and the video that the US space agency is transmitting to Earth, the coolant is gushing out of the pipeline in a fountain, which is certainly a significant obstacle to working overboard. The correspondent of “MK” understood the situation.

Recall that the spacewalk was necessary in order to complete the assembly of the Nauka module docked last year. This has not been possible since August 17, when the EVA had to be interrupted due to the failure of the battery in the spacesuit of cosmonaut Oleg Artemyev. After that, there was only one successful exit by Prokopiev and Petelin on November 18, and on November 25, the EVA was canceled – again there were problems with the same spacesuit as Artemyev’s. And so, when the issue with the spacesuit was resolved, before a new attempt at EVA, the cosmonauts saw in the porthole a fountain from the coolant of the Soyuz MS-22 spacecraft docked to the station, beating, as if from a bottle of champagne.

The ship’s thermal control system (STR) maintains the temperature and air humidity necessary for the crew in the descent vehicle and in the orbital compartment. Judging by the picture that the cosmonauts see overboard, the outer “circuit” of this system is damaged, through which the internal excess heat is removed to the outside. The coolant can be ethylene glycol or another liquid.

What caused the accident remains to be seen. This may be a collision with a micrometeorite or an explosion of the thermal control system itself.

The fact that this, most likely, toxic liquid can contaminate the outer surfaces of the modules, the station’s windows, is not such a big problem compared to the fact that astronauts may lose their rescue ship.

Judging by the NASA press service, nothing threatens the crew… Anna Kikina, who was supposed to accompany the work of her EVA colleagues, namely, while inside the station, using the ERA manipulator arm, transfers an additional radiation heat exchanger from the Rassvet small research module ” to the multi-purpose laboratory module “Science”, I had to do other work.

With the help of the same ERA, she tried to “examine” the place of the radiator rupture. As a result, several photographs and videos were dropped to Earth, which are now being studied by specialists from the Mission Control Center.