Two Russian crew members on board the International Space Station are heading out for a spacewalk today. Their mission is to investigate a mysterious hole that was spotted in a visiting spacecraft. This hole caused quite a bit of concern both on the ISS and down on Earth as it caused air to leak out of the ISS a few months ago. It has not yet been determined how this hole came to be and that’s what the cosmonauts aim to figure out from this spacewalk.
A lot of theories have come up about the origin of this mysterious hole. Some even claim that it reeks of in-space sabotage. This hole was first discovered in late August after NASA’s flight controllers noticed that air pressure on the ISS was dropping.
This was a sign that air was slowly leaking out. The crew members were informed and they traced the problem to this hole in one of the visiting Soyuz capsules that’s two millimeters wide. The capsules are used to transport astronauts to and from the ISS. The crew members quickly fixed up the hole with epoxy on a gauze wipe and there have been no problems with the air pressure since.
The theory considered the most probable right now is that the hole was drilled while the Soyuz capsule was being manufactured. It might have happened that a worker drilled somewhere they weren’t supposed to and then tried to cover it up accidentally before launch.
Russian cosmonauts Oleg Kononenko and Sergey Prokopyev will be heading out on a spacewalk at around 11 am ET today to take a closer look. For that, they will remove the thermal insulation and meteorite shield on the exterior that covers the hole. NASA will be airing live coverage of the spacewalk which is expected to take up to six hours.
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