Assurance offered to space station

Assurance offered to space station

By MARCIA DUNN Associated Press

Wednesday, January 7, 2004

Cape Canaveral, Fla. — Flight controllers assured the two men aboard the International Space Station on Tuesday that they are trying to chase down the source of a slow loss of air pressure and said the problem could take weeks to solve.

American and Russian space officials emphasized there is no immediate danger to the crewmen or the operation of the orbiting outpost. If the pressure were to fall dangerously low, astronaut Michael Foale and cosmonaut Alexander Kaleri could abandon the space station in the docked capsule and quickly return to Earth.

“But the situation has become significant enough . . . that a thorough investigation is under way and will continue over the next days and perhaps weeks,” said Mission Control in Houston.

“We’re going to take a very measured and methodical approach to sort through this problem,” said Mike Suffredini, the station’s operations and integration manager.

Foale and Kaleri spent a second day looking for the potential leak. They used an ultrasound leak detector to check valves throughout the complex, but found nothing suspicious. On Friday, they will inspect a Russian-built air purifier that engineers believe may be the culprit.

Suffredini said the space station had lost 2 1/4 pounds of air a day over the past two weeks. That is 34 pounds gone out of the roughly 900 pounds of air normally inside the complex.

The space station is now down to 14.2 pounds per square inch of pressure, the point at which flight rules call for replenishment, Suffredini said.

But equipment does not start malfunctioning until 13.9 pounds per square inch, and the real cutoff point for both systems and humans is about 10.2 pounds per square inch, Suffredini said.

Flight controllers notified Foale and Kaleri about the pressure drop on Monday. Although first detected on Jan. 1, the falling pressure has been traced back to Dec. 22. It coincides with the malfunction and ultimate breakdown of the primary oxygen generator on board and could be related to the use of backup oxygen-producing canisters, rather than an actual leak.