Now you have a water leak in Columbus: what do you do? Butch and I were trained on that in one of our Columbus specialist classes today.
First of all, why do we have water lines in Columbus, as well as throughout ISS, with the exception of the Russian segment? That’s how we cool our equipment! And it’s also how we cool the the cabin air, thanks to dedicated heat exchangers: that’s our air conditioning system. Think about how hot your laptop computer can get and now imagine how much heat we generate on ISS with so many computers and other electromechanical components! All that heat is collected by cooling water, then transferred to the ammonia lines outside ISS and finally rejected to space through the radiators.
So, a water leak is a really bad thing. Not only, or not so much, because you have a water spill, but because you’re progressively loosing cooling efficiency and your equipment will soon overheat. Let’s be clear: Columbus is pretty aggressive when it comes to protecting itself. If a certain amount of water is lost, it will pretty much shut itself down and leave only vital equipment running, reducing the thermal load to the point that no active water cooling is required.
But since we don’t want that to happen, we have procedures that have us work together with the ground in a coordinated effort to pinpoint the leak as fast as possible and isolate it. Since most of the possible leak locations are not in plain view, the hunt can be long!
One of the possible culprits in a water leak scenario could be the Water Pump Assembly. Good thing that Luca replaced a failed one on ISS a few months ago, so that we’re now back to full redundancy. You can see him in action in the picture!
12/09/2013