Space station leaking air, NASA has narrowed the source of an elusive leak

 Space station leaking air, NASA has narrowed the source of an elusive leak.

  • NASA is hunting for the source of a leak on the International Space Station.
  • The agency has tested most of the station but still hasn't found the source.
  • That means the leak is probably in one of the two sections crew members stayed while performing the tests.
  • One of those, the Zvezda Service Module, provides life support for the station's Russian side.
  • Engineers are looking into how they might test the remaining sections.
  • Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

The International Space Station has been leaking for more than a year. 

While the station is perpetually losing some air, officials first noticed an increase in that airflow last September. At the time, the leak wasn't major, but this summer, officials noticed an uptick in that already higher-than-usual rate.

So in late August, the three crew members aboard the station — NASA astronaut Chris Cassidy and Roscosmos cosmonauts Anatoly Ivanishin and Ivan Vagner — hunkered down in one module of the station and sealed off the others. After closing the hatches, they conducted leak tests on each section.

But their data didn't reveal leaks in those section.

That leaves only two modules that could be leaking: the ones the crew didn't test because they were inside them while monitoring the rest of the station. One is the Zvezda Service Module, which provides life support for the station's Russian side. The other is the Poisk Mini-Research Module 2, which serves as a port for docking spaceships and a place crew members prepare for spacewalks.

"With the crew living and working in these modules, it was impossible to achieve the proper environmental conditions necessary for this test," NASA spokesman Daniel Huot told Business Insider.

NASA and Roscosmos, Russia's space agency, are working to identify a "window of opportunity" to test those remaining modules for leaks, he added – either by finding a way for crew members to safely isolate the untested modules, or by using specialized detectors that wouldn't require sealing the sections off.

In the meantime, Huot said, "the crew is in no danger and the space station has ample consumables onboard to manage and maintain the nominal environment." 

Consumables, in this case, refers to breathable air.

Zvezda isn't the only life-support module on the station

NASA didn't consider the leak it detected a year ago to be major. Plus, other priorities, like spacewalks and crew exchanges, kept the agency and ISS crew too busy to collect enough data about the problem.

But once the leak rate increased, the agency decided it was time to do something about it, since if the leak were to quickly grow even bigger, the pressurized air-supply tanks that NASA sends up to the ISS on resupply missions might not be enough.

The Zvezda module, which launched in July 2000, was the first livable part of the space station in orbit. It provides the Russian half of the station with oxygen and drinkable water, and it's equipped with a machine that scrubs carbon dioxide from the air. The module also contains the section's sleeping quarters, dining room, refrigerator-freezer, and bathroom. 

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