NASA’s commonly scheduled Worldwide Area Station livestream gave viewers a quick, unintended scare final night time. At 6:28PM EST on June 12, an unidentified speaker appeared to start directing ISS crewmembers to deal with a commander affected by extreme decompression illness whose “prognosis… is comparatively tenuous.”
“Examine his pulse yet another time,” the particular person, doubtless a mission management flight surgeon, reportedly instructed over the published according to NBC News.
The person additionally suggested astronauts to put their critically in poor health colleague right into a spacesuit provided with pure oxygen with a purpose to present a “finest effort therapy,” and even steered the opportunity of ordering an emergency evacuation with a purpose to transport the commander to a hospital in Spain that included hyperbaric therapy services.
Decompression illness, colloquially known as “the bends,” is most steadily skilled by divers transitioning too rapidly between low- and high-pressure water depths, though excessive variations can happen in area when a spacecraft’s exterior stress is nonexistent. In these conditions, nitrogen bubbles kind in a physique’s arteries and blood vessels which block the move of oxygen, vitamins, and blood. If handled in time, the worst signs a sufferer would possibly expertise are extreme joint cramps. Depressurize too rapidly, nonetheless, and the difficulty is nearly instantaneously deadly resulting from mind hemorrhaging—as was sadly the case for 3 Russian cosmonauts aboard the Salyut-1 capsule in 1971.
[Related: NASA astronauts will scrape microorganisms off ISS during upcoming spacewalk.]
Understanding the severity of such conditions, it took almost an hour-and-a-half earlier than involved viewers may breathe a sigh of reduction final night time. At 8:05PM EST, NASA issued a statement on X confirming the audio was “inadvertently misrouted from an ongoing simulation the place crew members and floor groups practice for numerous eventualities in area and isn’t associated to an actual emergency… all stay wholesome and protected.” In response to NASA, there was a stable likelihood most ISS astronauts have been really asleep throughout the false alarm, because it occurred throughout the station’s “sleep interval.”
There is no such thing as a emergency state of affairs happening aboard the Worldwide Area Station. At roughly 5:28 p.m. CDT, audio was aired on the NASA livestream from a simulation audio channel on the bottom indicating a crew member was experiencing results associated to decompression…
— Worldwide Area Station (@Space_Station) June
13, 2024
It’s at the moment unclear how the audio was accidently piped by means of NASA’s ISS stay stream. Fashionable Science has reached out for clarification and can replace accordingly.
Final night time’s false alarm sadly wasn’t the final headache for the company. Earlier this morning, NASA introduced its scheduled two crewmember ISS spacewalk wanted to be postponed resulting from a (actual) “spacesuit discomfort subject.”
