Air leak spot aboard orbital outpost looks more like a scratch, says cosmonaut

MOSCOW, October 28. /TASS/. The air leakage place discovered aboard the International Space Station (ISS) looks more like a scratch 2-3 cm long, Cosmonaut Anatoly Ivanishin said at a post-flight press conference on Wednesday. "What we see is what I would describe as a scratch. I am not inclined to use the word ‘crack’ because we cannot look deep into the metal’s structure. This scratch is several centimeters long, about 2-3 cm," the cosmonaut said. The scratch is curvilinear, he added. A source told TASS in August that the space station’s Russian-American crew was working on tracing an air leak aboard the orbital outpost. Later, Russia’s State Space Corporation Roscosmos confirmed this information. The ISS crew reported to Russia’s Flight Control Center on the morning of October 15 that the cosmonauts had found the possible air leak spot in the inter-section compartment of the Zvezda module with the help of a tea bag. As the cosmonauts said, the air was possibly leaking through a fracture. The crack was no more than 4 cm wide and posed no threat to the space station’s safety, Roscosmos specified. The air leak spot has now been sealed with temporary means. Meanwhile, a source in the space industry told TASS that the air leak would be fully eliminated after the Soyuz MS-16 spacecraft’s landing. As the source explained, this measure was required to make some measurements with the closed hatches. Read more