Russian cosmonaut photographs incomprehensible ice crystals in the ISS’s window

No time to read?
Get a summary

Cosmonaut Sergei Korsakov captured a beautiful view of the rime from the window of the International Space Station. This may be the first photograph of ice crystals forming in a spacecraft window, and no one knows how they formed. IFLScience.

The photo shows a crescent-shaped ice formation appearing on Earth, as if the planet had an icy moon like Europa or Enceladus. The picture was posted by Korsakov on Twitter and Telegram at the end of May. On Telegram, the astronaut said that the observed ice crystals are quite long-lived, lasting for a day, and traces of condensation remain even after they melt. However, the mechanism of crystal formation is not entirely clear; No scientific articles were found on this subject.

When the IFLScience publication turned to the ISS crew, NASA, the European Space Agency and the Japan Space Agency for possible explanations on this matter, no one dared to comment as the window could be in the ISS’s Russian module. With Roscosmos, we are now trying to minimize it. Science journalists believe that ice crystals may form somewhere in the space between the outer and inner layers of the porthole on the ISS. In principle, they can be created inside the station. The water droplets may have condensed from the astronauts’ breathing, but the shape of the frost (almost a perfect circle) and the temperature on the ISS make this unlikely. However, in such a distribution of ice crystals it is possible that the corresponding temperature gradient of the porthole will arise.

No time to read?
Get a summary
Previous Article

Who is who on the new Catalan business map?

Next Article

Terelu Campos lost the newspapers with his partner in ‘Viva la vida’: ‘This girl is stupid’