A few weeks after the impressive leaks from a Soyuz spacecraft docked at the ISS, we know more about the Russian rescue mission planned to rescue the crew on board. If this failure at the level of the Soyuz does not endanger the cosmonauts, it does however condemn their return to Earth in the event of a major problem on board the international station.
Russia should definitively leave the international space station from 2024. In the meantime, the Russian space agency as well as its numerous modules which currently form the ISS, remain essential for the operation of the international station. It is therefore a new Soyuz which should take off towards the ISS, prematurely and above all empty. Indeed, if this launch was initially scheduled for March 2023, it should join the ISS crew next month. He will thus bring back to Earth 3 cosmonauts : the Russians Sergey Prokopyev and Dmitry Petelin as well as their American counterpart Francisco Rubio.
This special mission, recently accepted by NASA and the American administration, will thus allow the ISS to return to a safer situation, where each of the crew members can be repatriated to Earth in the event of major problem on board. Indeed, the Space X Crew Dragon emergency capsule containing only 4 places, currently among the 7 cosmonauts on board the ISS, three of them would be condemned to stay in Space. However, the Russian agency has clarified since the leak that in the event of imminent major danger, the use of the faulty Soyuz module could be considered as a last resort. Until now, it was the temperatures on board that prevented its use.
Collisions enter more and more space objects.
All this agitation is only caused by the partial destruction of the physical integrity of the Soyuz moored to the ISS. The latter is probably the result of a collision between a shower of remnants of meteors with the module of the Russian space agency. If this kind of incident remains rare, collisions between celestial objects or human space debris are more and more frequent. As a reminder, several hundreds of thousands of space debris, caused by human activity, revolve in orbit around our head at a speed greater than 27,000 kilometers per hour.
Source : wsj.com
