MOSCOW, December 12. /TASS/. Russian cosmonauts Oleg Kononenko and Sergei Prokopyev who inspected a hole in the crewed Soyuz MS-09 spacecraft during a spacewalk overnight to December 12 will transmit photos of the spaceship’s impaired section to Earth, Russia’s State Space Corporation Roscosmos told TASS on Wednesday.
"The cosmonauts will transmit digital images made during the spacewalk via the electronic communications system," the Roscosmos press office said.
The samples taken from the hole’s external surface will be sent together with the samples of the micro-meteorite shield to Earth on December 20 aboard the same Soyuz spacecraft for specialists’ further study, Roscosmos said.
Russian cosmonauts Kononenko and Prokopyev earlier made a spacewalk to inspect the hole in the Soyuz spacecraft’s casing. They unsealed the thermal insulation layer and the meteorite shield, inspected and photographed the hole and also scraped off samples from the hole’s surface.
Soyuz hull damage
On August 30, a drop in air pressure was registered on the ISS. The crew examined the compartments and add-on modules one by one to identify a two-millimeter hole in the hull of the Soyuz MS-09 spacecraft attached to the orbital outpost. In the evening of the same day it was patched up with several layers of epoxy resin. Pressure returned to normal. On August 31 the crew reinforced the patch with another layer of sealant.
The head of the Roscosmos Corporation, Dmitry Rogozin, said the Soyuz MS-09 spacecraft had been damaged with a drill from the inside. The Space Rocket Corporation Energia is conducting an investigation to identify those responsible. Inquiries are being made into who had access to the spacecraft, what works were carried out, and who supervised them.