Space Station Leaking Vital Coolant - NASA says

Source - Space.com

The football field sized International Space Station has a leakage of vital ammonia coolant, the astronauts on-board have discovered, and NASA is trying to resolve the problem. But there’s no immediate danger to the crew, NASA officials said today.

The ISS uses liquid chilled ammonia to cool down power systems on its eight giant solar array panels. A minor had been noticed in 2007 and NASA has been working on it ever since. The problem was solved by two astronauts in 2012 who took a spacewalk to rewire some coolant line and install a spare radiator because there were fears that the original radiator was damaged due to a micrometeorite impact.

Those measures had appeared to have solved the problem but now astronauts have observed a steady stream of frozen ammonia flakes leaking from the area of suspect coolant loop in the Photovoltaic Thermal Control System (PVTCS).

"It is in the same area, but we don't know whether it's the same leak," NASA spokesman Kelly Humphries of the Johnson Space Center in Houston told SPACE.com. Humphries said the agency was taking the leak seriously because it affects an important system — if they lose the ability to cool that particular solar array, it won't be able to generate power for the station. In fact, the leak has worsened to the point that Mission Control expects that particular loop to shut down within the next 24 hours.

“However, the crew is in no danger”, he added.

NASA engineers are reviewing plans to potentially move the station's robotic arm over to the area of the port truss, the scaffolding-like backbone of the station (the original leak was traced to the Port 6 truss).

"Tomorrow we'll plan to get the arm in the game to see if we can better pinpoint the location of the leak," Wheelock said.

Hadfield said he and his crewmates had noticed the rate of the leak varied depending on the orientation of the station with the sun, suggesting particular angles allowed the ammonia coolant to leak more quickly.

Today had otherwise been a relatively light day for the crew of the International Space Station, which had taken some time off to celebrate the Russian holiday Victory Day. Hadfield, Marshburn and Romanenko are due to depart the space station on Monday (May 13) to return to Earth after a roughly five-month stay. Three new crewmembers plan to launch on May 28 from Kazakhstan on a Russian spacecraft to take up residence on the orbiting outpost.

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