Two cosmonauts on the Mir space station, Anatoliy Solovyev and Pavel Vinogradov, failed to seal a hatch properly after their recent spacewalk.

This resulted in the leakage of air from the hatch compartment, flight controller Vladimir Solovyev told ITAR-TASS news agency.

"The pressure there is currently 150-170 mm when it should be at least 550 mm," he was quoted as saying in the Russian-language report.

"This is nothing terrible" because the hatch compartment is separate from the main accommodation on Mir, he said.

"The incomplete seal won't have any effect whatsoever on the rest of the programme," Solovyev said.

ITAR-TASS news agency said the problem was in the Kvant-2 module.

The Spektr module depressurized after the collision with the Progress cargo ship on 25th June.

"Two parts of Mir have now sprung leaks," the agency added.

The problem will be dealt with during the next spacewalk on Thursday.

BBC Monitoring (http://www.monitor.bbc.co.uk), based in Caversham in southern England, selects and translates information from radio, television, press, news agencies and the Internet from 150 countries in more than 70 languages.
 

Back to top | BBC News Home | BBC Homepage | ©