The uncalculated powerful loads that arose during the attitude control of the International Space Station (ISS) by foreign spacecraft could cause a leak in the body of the Russian Zvezda module. I told about this on April 1 “RIA News” source in the rocket and space industry.
“Among the reasons for the appearance of leaks in the hull, experts consider the off-design powerful loads that arose when the orientation of the ISS was controlled by an American shuttle or a European cargo vehicle ATV,” the agency’s source said.
In the period from 2008 to 2015, five ATV spacecraft visited the ISS, all of them docked to the Zvezda module and were used both to control the station’s orientation in space and to correct its orbit. Until 2011, US shuttles also controlled the orientation of the ISS in space and adjusted its orbit.
The source noted that Russian cosmonauts are now continuing to search for leaks in the intermediate chamber of the Zvezda module.
According to him, there is an assumption that air leakage can pass through sealed entries – these are the places where pipes and cables exit through the case to the outer surface of the module. A new leak detector is to be brought in on the Soyuz MS-18 spacecraft in April to search for possible leak points.
In September 2019, a small air leak was recorded on the ISS. In October 2020, the Russian crew discovered the first crack in the intermediate chamber of the Zvezda module and repaired it in March 2021. As previously reported in “Roskosmos”, this crack did not threaten the station and the mission participants. Later, it became known about the second crack, which the crew also repaired in March, but the air leak did not stop.
Due to a leak, equivalent to a hole with a diameter of 0.2 mm, the air pressure at the station drops by 0.4 mm Hg per day. Art., but this is far from emergency values - from 0.5 mm per minute. Nevertheless, the ISS needs to be pressurized regularly with nitrogen, air and oxygen to compensate for the leak.
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source https://pledgetimes.com/foreign-ships-may-be-the-culprit-of-the-iss-air-leak/
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