Slow leak detected aboard Space Station

At the typical velocities for this kind of impact, probably not. At these speeds, computer analyses ignore the solid properties of the colliding objects, modeling them as liquids, instead. (The shear resistances is just not relevant, and everything liquefies from the heat from the impact. Even that heat loss is negligible in terms of the total energy of the collision.)

Most likely, there would be fragments of the impactor and the hull, mixed together with each other and oxidized with the station air, floating about. I won't risk speculating about the fragment size, other than to say it would be pretty dang small. (I'm leaning toward "powder," but personally wouldn't rule out either "grit" or whatever "finer than powder" is.)

MMOD impacts tend towards "vaporize" rather than "puncture". That's how (and why) a Whipple shield works.

ISS travels at a very low orbit which the earth’s atmosphere does a great job of keeping clean. They occasionally manover around anything large enough to be a significant issue. On to of that space is huge and largely empty even at the speed they are traveling.

The ISS is also designed to take a hit and can generally survive similar impacts without issue.

Micrometeoroid impacts happen fairly regularly, but they're usually not energetic enough to make a hole. For example, there was a instance in 2012 where one hit a window: http://www.spacesafetymagazine.com/space-debris/kessler-synd...

But as that incident shows, such impacts are often relatively benign - in that case, they didn't even need to replace the outer layer window.

The hull is reinforced with four or five layers of shielding - the above article has a nice diagram: https://i2.wp.com/www.spacesafetymagazine.com/wp-content/upl...

This means the usual consequence of a micrometeroid impact is pitting of the outer layers that may not even be noticed.

For larger objects that present a serious danger, the US Space Surveillance Network attempts to track them and predict "conjunctions" with a zone around the ISS which extends 2km above and below it, and 25 km in each direction on the orbital path. Anything that's expected to intersect with this zone is analyzed and may result in the station being moved to get out of the way. These are mostly due to space junk of human origin. In 2013, there were at least ~70 of these "conjunction notifications", although this results in only about one move of the station per year, on average.

There's a description of how these cases are handled at https://arstechnica.com/science/2013/07/how-nasa-steers-the-... :

> "Any object with between a 1-in-10,000 and 1-in-100,000 chance of colliding with the station meets the "yellow" threshold. Flight rules say that the station must be moved out of the way in response to a yellow threshold object unless such a move results in a mission impact—"Like, if we do the burn, we're going to miss an opportunity to launch a Soyuz, for instance," explains Parris. "Do we delay the Soyuz, or do we do the maneuver?" A "red" threshold is assigned to any collision with a likelihood of between 1 (in other words, absolutely certain) and 1-in-10,000. Flight rules are more strict for maneuvers in response to red threshold objects: the station is always moved for a red threshold object, regardless of mission impact, unless a maneuver represents more risk than not maneuvering (for example, if there's a piece of equipment that's damaged on the ISS and a maneuver would exacerbate that damage)."

This doesn't help in the case of meteor showers, where the Earth is travelling through a zone full of small debris, typically caused by the trail of a comet. In those cases, the station has to rely on its shielding, but the debris sizes in those cases are almost all within the limits that the shielding can handle.

Not only first discovered. The first temporary patch was Gerst's finger.

Yes.

Duck tape for applications needing large range of temperature stability and/or good electrical isolation. I saw it used extensively in aerospace electronics for commercial aircraft.

Duct tape?

Or tape for ducks?

If you open up a laptop, it’s the orange film that's often used to hold wires in place, and insulate parts from the casing.

Is that similar tape as the metal infused 'speed tape' that they use for temporary repairs or to seal panels on jetliners?

It gets used a lot in electronics assemblies, and places where you need high temp resistance (reflow ovens, SPACE), and low-to-no outgassing (important in vacuum applications). So it makes sense that they'd have it onboard.

So, uh, that's possibly a 'yes.'

Why do you assume that? That's probably what the Kapton tape is for.

They do, it's called kapton tape.;)

Even once you identify which module, there are many square meters of outer wall to find a millimeter hole in. And from what I have seen, every square millimeter of wall is more or less covered with stuff. There has to be a method to it.

Indeed they used an ultrasonic leak detector.

The original url was at independent.co.uk, one of the UK's national newspapers.

Epoxy can cure in a vacuum, as demonstrated by common fabrication procedures (sort of). The temperature isn't actually that big of a thing. Space is "cold" because there's no heat but also nothing to conduct it away. It actually gets quite hot if you're facing the sun as well. Long story short though, as long as there's no gas passing through the hole, it should stay around the internal temperature of the ISS or at least close enough to cure.

I guess they're too busy building boring old space stations.

You welcome!

And you welcome to upvote me, since no matter what I say, a few of HN moderators will continue to be down-voting my postings.

Oh well...

Ksp is a truly amazing game.

The ISS is orbiting, it's falling sideways fast enough to miss the earth.

It's effectively in freefall, so although objects at 400km altitude are subject to 80% of the gravitational pull you experience on the ground, the astronauts don't notice it because they're falling sideways at the same speed as the ISS.

Edit: I just noticed that the post you were replying to included pretty much the exact same information I did, so I apologise if what I've said hasn't helped.

The gravity is there, thats what keeps the ISS in orbit. However the gravity acts on everything in the ISS the same, so there is no relative acceleration in the ISS. A cosmonaut who is not touching anything and not moving relative to the walls will thus stay not touching anything, yet at the same time will still be accelerating towards the earth.

This is why we should use the term "free-fall", instead of "zero-gravity".

There is no way known to remove gravity. At best, you can cause the room to fall at the same rate as the things inside the room, causing the contents to float around.

It's the same principle that allows specialized airplanes to create the sensation of weightlessness, while very-much in almost Earth-surface gravity.

Nah, you spray soapy water all over the inside of the module and watch where it egresses.

Even this 1.5mm hole was so small that they didn't bother to wake anyone up, and instead waited until the next workday.

Sorry, can you explain the joke?

I feel like they'll take a little anti-freezer burn over suffocation.

If only they had an inanimate carbon rod to block the hole!

My guess is that he has some kind of glove on.

I'll let someone else have the fun doing the math, but I would guess his heat radiation (convection and conduction with vacuum are going to be negligible) would be on the order of milliwatts, which'll take an hour or so to change the temperature of 10g of skin by 1°