The routine spacewalk which was supposed to be carried out by two Russian cosmonauts aboard the International Space Station (ISS) was cancelled. This happened because liquid was detected coming out of the Soyuz spacecraft.
The plume of liquid, as seen in the video captured by NASA, looks like snowflake-like particles. This burst came from the back of the Soyuz MS-22 capsule and is thought to be a coolant leak.
NASA said none of the seven members of the current ISS crew, which includes three Russian cosmonauts, three US NASA astronauts and one Japanese astronaut, were in any danger from the leak.
The crash happened just as the two cosmonauts, crew commander Sergey Prokopyev and flight engineer Dimitri Petelin, were preparing for a planned spacewalk to move radiators from one module to another on the Russian ISS segment.
An official for Russian mission control operations in Moscow is heard telling Prokopyev and Petelin in a radio transmission that their spacewalk is aborted. Meanwhile, engineers are hard at work determining the nature and origin of the leak.
NASA commentator on the livestream, Rob Navias, broadcast from NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, also said the spacewalk was canceled because of the leak.
Navias said the Soyuz craft arrived at the space station in September, carrying Prokopyev, Petelin and US astronaut Frank Rubio to the ISS. The craft remains on the laboratory side of the orbit facing Earth.
"The spacewalk planned for Wednesday (14/12) was previously postponed once at the end of November, because the coolant pump in the cosmonaut's spacesuit failed," Navias said as quoted by Reuters.
The spacewalk will be the 12th this year on the ISS and the 257th in the space platform's 22-year history.
Navias said it was too early to know what implications the leak might have for the integrity of the spacecraft, and whether the leak could create difficulties returning the crew to Earth at the end of their mission.
There are five other spacecraft parked on the ISS, consisting of two SpaceX capsules (Crew Dragon and Cargo Dragon), a cargo space ship Northrop Grumman Cygnus and two Russian supply ships, Progress 81 and Progress 82.
The ISS, which spans the size of a football field and orbits above Earth, has hosted and served astronauts since 2000. The space station is operated by a US-Russia-led partnership that includes Canada, Japan and 11 European countries.