A leak of liquid, possibly coolant, has been discovered from a Soyuz capsule docked at the International Space Station.
She was spotted at 1:45 this night shortly before Russian cosmonauts Sergey Prokopyev and Dmitri Petelin began a planned extravehicular activity.
The causes and severity of the problem are not yet known.
There is no danger to the crew, said Rob Navias, a NASA spokesman via NasaTv, and in the next few hours they will try to solve the problems with Soyuz MS-22, which is the lifeboat and return to Earth for 3 of the 7 current crew members.
The Soyuz MS-22 spacecraft has been leaking apparent coolant fluid more than three hours.
International Space Station managers are discussing the situation.
The cosmonauts who were preparing for tonight's spacewalk are safely back in the space station.
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The discovery was made by Russian ground technicians who had noticed a significant leak of an unknown substance from the aft portion of the Soyuz MS-22 capsule docked to the Rassvet module.
Visible leak on video, where it appears as a constant ooze of snow-like material.
At the same time, a pressure drop in the external cooling circuit of the capsule was highlighted.
The causes of the loss are not known at the moment, whether it is due to the impact of some micrometeorite or to a malfunction of the Soyuz systems.
At the moment there are 7 astronauts on the Space Station (ISS): 4 who arrived in orbit with the SpaceX Crew-5 mission - the Japanese Koichi Wakata, the Americans Josh Cassada, Nicole Mann and the Russian Anna Kikina - the two Russians Dimitri Petelin and Sergey Prokopyev and the American Frank Rubio arrived with Soyuz MS-22, which has now encountered the problem.
The Soyuz is also the shuttle that should bring the 3 astronauts back to Earth at the end of the mission, on March 28, and is designed as a rescue shuttle in case of any problems on the Station.
If the technicians were to assess that the Soyuz is no longer able to bring astronauts back to Earth, a replacement shuttle capable of docking with the ISS in an automated way could be launched.