Damaged Russian Spacecraft Safely Sinks in Pacific Ocean

Admin February 20, 2023


Roscosmos, Russia's space agency, confirmed that the MS-21 cargo spacecraft safely sank into the Pacific Ocean after deorbiting from the International Space Station (ISS) on Sunday. Before it fired its deorbit engine at 8:45 a.m. IST to undock from the ISS on Saturday for a splashdown, the spacecraft was docked to the Poisk module.

"Unburned parts of its structure fell into the South Pacific Ocean's inaccessible region. Roscosmos wrote in a Telegram post, "Progress MS-21 was launched from Baikonur on October 26, 2022, by a Soyuz-2.1a carrier rocket. Two days later, it delivered more than 2.5 tons of cargo to the ISS."

One of the two Roscosmos ships that was discovered to be leaking coolant into space due to possible damage was the deorbiter spacecraft. The first was found on December 15, 2022, aboard the crewed spacecraft Soyuz MS-22; the second was found on MS-21 on February 12. Coolant is used by a spacecraft to keep the crew safe and keep the avionics from overheating. Even worse, the leak caused Roscosmos to postpone the spacewalk that its cosmonauts were planning, while NASA put off the event.

While a micrometeoroid was thought to have caused the first leak, Roscosmos and NASA are still looking into what caused the second leak. The inspection team used Canadarm 2 earlier this week to collect imagery of the suspected area of damage on MS-21 that will be used to determine the cause of the leak.

The MS-23 crew ship, which Roscosmos intends to dispatch on February 24, will take its place. Cosmonauts Sergey Prokopyev, Dmitri Petelin, and NASA astronaut Frank Rubio, who flew to the ISS last year for a six-month stay, will be returned in this new capsule.

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