Something stinks.
Smelt It
As if they need any more problems, the astronauts on board the International Space Station were besieged by a noxious odor situation over the weekend.
In a statement posted on X-formerly-Twitter, NASA’s ISS account noted that when the Russians’ Progress cargo ship docked with the rest of the space station, cosmonauts “noticed an unexpected odor and observed small droplets.”
According to the statement, the cosmonauts shut off Russia’s Poisk module from the rest of their segment of the space station so that its air scrubbers and contamination sensors could do their thing. As Ars Technica points out, however, NASA may have been downplaying the situation.
Per reporting from journalist Anatoly Zak of the independent space-watching site Russian Space Web, the hatch connecting Poisk to the Progress cargo spacecraft had to be “closed immediately due to a toxic smell and possible contamination hazard in the form of droplets.”
American astronaut Don Pettit apparently reported a “spray paint-like” smell on the American side of the ISS around that time, though it’s unclear whether it was related to the Poisk odor.
Either way, the cosmonauts wore protective equipment and activated additional air scrubbers on their end of the space station, and the “Trace Contaminant Control Sub-assembly” was activated on the US side as well, Russian Space Web noted.
Dealt It
While neither space agency seems to know what caused the smell this time around, repeated leaks have plagued Russia’s spacecraft.
Along with the small leak in Roscosmos’ Zvezda life support capsule earlier this year, the most recent and more severe of these issues occurred at the end of 2022 and the beginning of 2023, when both a crewed Soyuz capsule and a Progress cargo freighter suffered coolant leaks.
Roscosmos blamed those leaks on the impact of space debris, and there has reportedly been tension behind the scenes as NASA and its Russian counterpart try to get to the bottom of the issue
With this latest noxious odor issue, it seems likely that tension between the rival space agencies may again rise — though to be fair, NASA has plenty of its own ISS problems to handle first.
More on the ISS: NASA Still Trying to Figure Out Why Astronaut Was Hospitalized After Return to Earth