[Rurudyne]

Is Congresscritter Adam Schiff onboard?

[ealgeone]

bubbles??

[Paladin2]

Smoke test.

Soapy water.

Helium detector [used outside]

[DBrow]

I assume spraying bubble solution won’t work in orbit.

I used to find pinpoint leaks with an ultrasonic gadget that heterodyned ultrasonic down to audio range. Worked great on high pressure capillary plumbing for IR detectors.

[Right Wing Assault]

a href=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ejOzxVUF3w

This looks fun.

[wildcard_redneck]

Always check the front hole first.

[montag813]

[Viking2002]

If it’s an small internal leak, could they close one compartment at a time, spray an inert, lightly colored aerosol, and see if the cloud gets slowly pulled toward the source of the leak?

[llevrok]

[llevrok]

In the good old days of smoking on passenger airplanes, maintenance used to find weak spots in the fuselage by nicotine stains on the outside of the aircraft.

[PeterPrinciple]

Still, he added, the leak is too small to be a threat to the crew or the station right now.
“The leak rate is still stable and well below the design specifications for the station and presents no concern for crew or vehicle safety,” Huot said.

---

folks, get past the headlines and lies of the media

[TigersEye]

Somebody is sneaking out to have a smoke.

[Bayard]

They need to coat the station in something and see where the bubbles leak out.

Would there be a product that keeps viscosity at super extreme changes in temp?

[doorgunner69]

Freon worked well for leak testing until they banned it. Dunno if it will work venting into vacuum though.

[moovova]

[IronJack]

I suppose dipping it in a water tank and looking for bubbles is out of the question.

[AlaskaErik]

Pop a smoke bomb and see where it exits the space station.

[TChad]

The Andromeda Strain virus is eating through the hatch seals.

[NappyOne]

I just read a report on the 2018 leak. I would have thought a 2mm hole would be pretty alarming, but it was considered by MCC-Houston to be small and non-threatening. It was, as this story says, hunted down and patched.

This one must be very small. Merely an annoyance. They sealed all the modules, collected sensor data for a period and still could not isolate to a module.

If this leak is in one of the outer bulkheads, the bigger task is going to be locating it once isolated. I am pretty sure all those modules, certainly all the US, the Japanese and ESA modules, do not have a lot of bulkhead surface not obstructed by some sort of equipment or experiment rack.

What is stunning to me is how casual MCC-Houston has become about leaks. The panic induced by the first leak was a sight to see. Now it’s, “Meh... we’ll track it down when we get some spare time.”

Hard to believe it will be 20 years this November since ISS was first crewed.

The NappyOne

[kaehurowing]

Officials first noticed a leak last September, but they didn’t do anything about it for nearly a year, since the leak wasn’t major.

---

Kind of like my toilet.