Russia Will Abandon Soyuz on Orbit, Fly Up a New One to Bring Crew Home
upstart writes:
The temperature inside the vehicle could reach the low 40s Celsius during Earth return:
Four weeks ago, as two Russian cosmonauts were preparing to conduct a spacewalk, a Soyuz spacecraft attached to the International Space Station started to leak uncontrollably.
The spacewalk was canceled, and since then, Russian and US spaceflight engineers have been analyzing the cause of the leak and its implications for future travel to and from the large laboratory in low-Earth orbit. They have now deduced that a micrometeoroid or small piece of orbital debris struck the external cooling loop of the Soyuz spacecraft, causing all of its coolant to vent into space, and put a recovery plan into place.
Although there were no immediate threats to the seven astronauts on board the space station, there was the not-insignificant question of how the three people who had ridden on board this Soyuz MS-22 spacecraft into orbit- cosmonauts Sergey Prokopyev and Dmitri Petelin and NASA's Frank Rubio-would subsequently get home.
Now, we finally have an answer. On Wednesday, officials from NASA and the Russian state-owned space corporation, Roscosmos, said a replacement Soyuz spacecraft will launch to and autonomously dock with the station next month. The crew that would have flown in the damaged Soyuz MS-22 vehicle will instead fly home in this Soyuz MS-23 spacecraft later in 2023. The leaky Soyuz MS-22 vehicle will make an autonomous return to Earth, bereft of crew, likely in March.
The executive director for human spaceflight at Roscosmos, Sergei Krikalev, said during a teleconference with reporters Wednesday that he is confident the cooling system was damaged by an object approximately 1 mm in diameter. This assessment was based on high-resolution imagery of the damage site and ground tests to recreate the problem. It cannot be determined whether this was a tiny meteor fragment or one of the countless pieces of space junk whizzing around low-Earth orbit. [Ed Comment: Other reporting claims that it was part of a meteorite but does not quote a verifiable source. Janrinok]
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