‘Urgent situation’ reported with Space Station cooling system, may require spacewalk

Exactly seven months to the day since crew members on board the International Space Station performed a spacewalk to repair a leak in the station's cooling system, the ISS suffered another another cooling system failure, which was called an "urgent situation" on Wednesday.

Tom Costello, from NBC News, reported over his Twitter account at 5:41 p.m. Eastern Time:

And then a few minutes later:

According to NASA, "the pump module on one of the space station’s two external cooling loops automatically shut down when it reached pre-set temperature limits."

A flow control valve inside the pump, which prevents the cooled ammonia from freezing the water in the system's heat exchanger, is suspected of not functioning properly. As a result, that cooling loop shut down, and the second cooling loop took over for it. Some non-critical systems were shut down to reduce the load on the system, while ground crews run through troubleshooting procedures.

The cooling system on the station is very important, since the equipment on board generates a lot of heat. If that heat couldn't be vented properly into space, it would grow unbearably hot inside the ISS, and you can't just open a door to cool things down.

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At the moment, it appears as though NASA is content with leaving the system as-is, with 'cooling loop b' doing all the work, and it could remain that way long-term. Otherwise, it's business as usual on the station, with just those non-critical systems shut down, and the crew members are continuing on with science experiments.

One experiment, in particular, is the Canadian Space Agency's Radi-N Neutron Field Study. Eight gel-filled canisters are placed around the station to read the neutron radiation in the station environment. When a neutron strikes the gel, a bubble forms, and the number of bubbles shows how much of a dose the area is receiving. This is the second run of the experiment being performed before during solar minimum, and now during solar maximum. The results should give scientists more insights on radiation exposure in space.

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