MOSCOW, May 10 (RIA Novosti) - Another ammonia leak was detected in the cooling system of the International Space Station (ISS) on Thursday, NASA said.
At around 19:30 Moscow time [15:30 GMT] on Thursday, the station’s crew reported seeing small white flakes floating away from an area of the International Space Station’s P6 truss structure.
“The crew reports, along with imagery and data received by flight controllers in Mission Control in Houston, confirmed that the rate of the ammonia leaking from this section of the cooling system has increased,” a statement on NASA website reads.
“The station continues to operate normally otherwise and the crew is in no danger,” NASA said.
Ammonia is used to cool the station’s power channels that provide electricity to station systems. Each solar array has its own independent cooling loop.
This ammonia loop is the same one that spacewalkers attempted to troubleshoot a leak on during a spacewalk on November 1, 2012. It is not yet known whether this increased ammonia flow comes from the same leak, which at the time, was not visible.
According to the space agency, the leak rate could result in a shutdown of this cooling loop in about 48 hours.
