NASA announced Sunday that it is considering a series of spacewalks or a resupply mission to fix a broken cooling loop on the International Space Station, which was shut down last week after the malfunction of a flow control valve inside a pump module.
According to NASA, the pump module inside one of the space station’s two external cooling loops, which circulate ammonia outside the space station to keep both internal and external equipment cool, automatically stopped working when it reached a pre-set low temperature limit. The problem was linked to a malfunctioning flow control valve, which reportedly stopped “positioning itself properly” last Wednesday, resulting in the temperature drop.
The cooling lines must remain at a certain temperature to enable the system’s heat exchangers to dissipate excess heat from the station through the external radiators on the complex, the agency said.
The crew and the station itself are not considered in danger, but ground teams did move some electrical systems over to the second cooling loop following the failure of the pump module. Several other systems have also been powered down temporarily inside three modules—the Harmony node, the Kibo laboratory and the Columbus laboratory—while officials work to fix the problem.
