Space News reports, “NASA is playing down concerns raised in a recent report about a long-running air leak in the Russian segment of the International Space Station, saying they have recently reduced the rate of the leak. A report by NASA’s Office of Inspector General released Sept. 26 noted that, in June, the ISS program had elevated a leak in a section of the Russian Zvezda module “to the highest level of risk in its risk management system.” NASA uses a system where both the likelihood and severity of a risk is rated on a scale of one to five; the leak rated a five on both.”
Full Story (Space News)
Tag: at ISS
Wilmore Reports Strange Noise Coming from Starliner Spacecraft
Ars Technica reports, “On Saturday NASA astronaut Butch Wilmore noticed some strange noises emanating from a speaker inside the Starliner spacecraft. ‘I’ve got a question about Starliner,’ Wilmore radioed down to Mission Control at Johnson Space Center in Houston. ‘There’s a strange noise coming through the speaker… I don’t know what’s making it.’ Wilmore said he was not sure if there was some oddity in the connection between the station and the spacecraft causing the noise, or something else. He asked the flight controllers in Houston to see if they could listen to the audio inside the spacecraft. A few minutes later, Mission Control radioed back that they were linked via ‘hardline’ to listen to audio inside Starliner, which has now been docked to the International Space Station for nearly three months.”
Full Story (Ars Technica)
Astronauts Arrive at ISS
Reuters reported a four-man crew “arrived at the International Space Station (ISS) early on Saturday for a two-week stay in the latest such mission arranged entirely at commercial expense by Texas-based startup company Axiom Space.” Their arrival “came about 37 hours after the Axiom quartet’s Thursday evening liftoff in a rocketship from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida.”
Full Story (Reuters)
Wilmore and Williams Splash Down Aboard SpaceX Dragon After Nine-month Stay in Space
The Washington Post reports, “The spacecraft carrying NASA astronauts Sunita Williams and Barry “Butch” Wilmore splashed down Tuesday evening in the Gulf of Mexico after a 286-day odyssey that started with a technical problem that forced NASA to swap vehicles and extend the mission from about eight days to nine months.”
Full Story (Washington Post)
Video
NASA’s SpaceX Crew-9 Re-Entry and Splashdown
(NASA; YouTube)