A coolant leak lasting for at least three hours Wednesday night aboard a Russian Soyuz space capsule docked to the International Space Station could have been caused by a tiny meteoroid strike, a senior Russian space official said Thursday.
NASA and Russia's space agency, Roscosmos, said no astronauts were endangered by the leak, which forced mission control officers in Moscow to call off a planned spacewalk by two cosmonauts as fluid sprayed outward into space, as seen on live video during a NASA webcast.
"The cause of the leak in Soyuz MS-22 could be a micrometeoroid hitting the ship's radiator," Sergei Krikalev, head of human spaceflight at Roscosmos, said in a statement posted on Telegram.
