Part 1 of 2 Parts
My last posts were about problems that the Russians are having at the International Space Station (ISS). One of the problems that I talked about involved the finding of a small hole in August of 2018 that appeared to have been drilled in the wall of a Russian module on the ISS
On August 29, 2018, ISS controllers at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston registered a slight drop in atmospheric pressure in the space station. They notified the ISS crew the next day. The crew of the station was able to trace the leak to a small hole in the wall of the Russian Soyuz MS-09 spacecraft which had docked with the ISS in June carrying astronaut and flight engineer Serena Auñón-Chancellor, European space agency astronaut Alexander Gerst and Russian cosmonaut Sergey Prokopyev.
Once the leak had been found, Prokopyev, the commander of the Soyuz at the time, fixed the two-millimeter hole with epoxy and gauze. NASA officials denied that the crew of the ISS was ever in any danger.
Russian space officials decided to investigate the leak in order to determine its cause. Dmitry Rogozin is the head of Roscosmos, the Russian space agency. Shortly after the investigation was launched, he announced that the leak in the Soyuz module was caused by a hole that had been drilled in the wall of the module. According to Rogozin, the person who drilled the hole did not control the drill very well and caused marks on the wall around the hole. The Russian officials investigating the leak speculated that the unsteady hand on the drill was probably caused by the fact that whoever drilled the hole was working in microgravity. This meant that the hole was drilled by someone on the ISS. They stated that the fault did not lie with the Russian engineers who assembled and tested the Soyuz spacecraft before it was launched.
NASA knew exactly where every U.S. astronaut was in the ISS at the time they first registered the drop in cabin pressure. The video footage showed that none of the U.S. astronauts on the ISS were anywhere near the Russian section where the Soyuz was docked when the lead was f first detected. The Russians were still convinced that one of the crew on the ISS sabotaged the Soyuz.
As far as NASA was concerned, the most probable explanation for the hole was human error on the ground which happened before launch. A technician in Russia could have accidentally damaged the wall of the Soyuz and then tried to cover up the damage with a patch. The patch could have come loose during the flight to orbit or during its time on the station after repeated exposure to temperatures extremes as the ISS orbited the Earth.
Roscosmos was supposed to have looked into this possibility but the agency has never disclosed any information on what they may have found. Relations between Roscosmos and NASA have grown more difficult in recent years but NASA hopes that the two can continue to have a productive orbital partnership.
Please read Part 2 next