Russia embarks on a mission to rescue the stranded International Space Station crew after a meteorite strike | International Space Station

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Moscow will launch a rescue ship to the International Space Station next month to bring home three crew members who are actually stuck in orbit after their original capsule was struck by a meteor.

A docked Soyuz MS-22 spacecraft had a massive leak last month, spraying coolant into space and prompting a pair of astronauts to abort a planned spacewalk.

While the Russian space agency, Roscosmos, said the strike did not cause an immediate threat to the space station’s crew, it did raise concerns about whether everyone on the orbital site could return to Earth in an emergency.

With the leak raising cabin temperatures, MS-22 was deemed unfit, leaving only one operational “escape pod” docked on the International Space Station – the SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft. There are seven people aboard the space station, but the SpaceX capsule only has four seats.

After deliberations, Roscosmos said it decided to advance the planned March launch of the Soyuz MS-23 rocket to February 20 so that it could be used to carry Russian cosmonauts Sergey Prokopyev and Dmitry Petlin and American astronaut Francisco Rubio back to Earth.

Roscosmos said that if a “particularly critical” situation arose on the ISS in the weeks leading up to it, the possibility of using the damaged Soyuz MS-22 to rescue the crew would be considered.

MS-23 was initially planned to accommodate three crew members, but would head empty as a rescue ship. And Yuri Borisov, the head of Roscosmos, did not say when Prokopyev, Petlin and Rubio would return to Earth in a backup Soyuz.

Roscosmos added that the damaged MS-22 would return without a crew as soon as the replacement arrived.

Micrometeorites, which are naturally occurring pieces of rock or minerals that can be as small as a grain of sand, pose a significant danger to human spaceflight. They catapult around the Earth at 17,000 mph (27,400 km/h) – much faster than the speed of a bullet.

Roscosmos said that the diameter of the micrometeor that hit the docked Soyuz ship was small, which made a hole in the capsule with a diameter of only 1 millimeter. It caused significant damage, as NASA TV images showed white snowflake-like particles streaming from behind.

Man-made “space junk” can also damage equipment. In 2021, Russia blew up one of its satellites in a missile test that created clouds of zooming fragments.

Space has been a rare area of ​​cooperation between Moscow and Washington since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

The International Space Station was launched in stages beginning in 1998 at a time of increasing cooperation between the United States and Russia nearly a decade after the end of the Cold War. The old space station is scheduled to “de-orbit” in 2031, with a planned descent to a remote point in the Pacific Ocean.

Meanwhile, a new space race between the United States and China is heating up. In 2021, the Beijing Space Program established the first manned space station to orbit the Earth. The 70-ton Tiangong Palace, meaning “heavenly palace”, is expected to operate for at least 10 years.

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