Originally posted by @sonhouse
https://www.sciencealert.com/that-leak-on-the-iss-was-made-by-a-human-and-not-a-micrometeoroid

It has been shown to be a hole drilled in the ISS wall from the inside, they can see marks of a drill in the hole.

The question or questions are why, what is to be gained from such an act.
It could be an American astronaut as direct sabotage or it could be ...[text shortened]... ched, it had to have been done after it was connected to ISS.

So the investigation continues.

If someone wanted to sabotage ISS - why drill such a tiny hole? Why not make a big kaboom?

Originally posted by @fabianfnas
If someone wanted to sabotage ISS - why drill such a tiny hole? Why not make a big kaboom?

It may have been just an accident where the dude didn't want to admit it.
It was a slow leak, it would have taken several weeks to drain the air. I guess there are no dash cams onboard ISS to show who did it. One thing clear, it had to be done while in orbit.

Originally posted by @sonhouse
It may have been just an accident where the dude didn't want to admit it.
It was a slow leak, it would have taken several weeks to drain the air. I guess there are no dash cams onboard ISS to show who did it. One thing clear, it had to be done while in orbit.

How do you drill a hole by accident?

Originally posted by @metal-brain
How do you drill a hole by accident?

I am just posting a best case scenario. Maybe the dude thought he was somehow trying to access a screw or some such. But I would have thought in that case, it would have been vetted by ground control. 'Ok this is ground control, I see you need access to that adjustment screw now hidden by the plastic cover. Take a 2 mm drill and drill through just the cover and that will expose the screw adjuster underneath. Don't go any deeper though, you will drill through the wall if you do.

So he says, Roger that, will do it later. Ground: Ok roger that,

Of course that is just something I just made up but you see my point about a possible innocent incident.
The hole was clearly drilled since they see the cuts caused by drilling. One thing I wonder, if that was drilled, what happened to the bits left over. When I drill into something, the stuff previously on the material is now gone and just collects on the table you use to drill the hole and some on the drill itself. So the dude had to clean up after himself and where would he put the debris? Probably in the nearest toilet. But if they could find all the drilling equipment onboard and locate the drill, looking at that drill could reveal microscopic bits of plastic left over from the actual drilling and may be used as forensic evidence unless the dude hid the drill but there should be an exact count of such tools, Toolbox A43 has the following items, one hand held electric drill, battery pack, charger, and 12 drills.
If A43 has only 11 drills......

Originally posted by @fabianfnas
Perhaps Goddidit?

God doesn't know jack about how to run a drill😉

The point about using a bigger drill, perhaps the dude, if it was sabotage, wanted to survive the ultimate fate of the drilling and perhaps that was the biggest drill they had onboard.

Originally posted by @sonhouse
It may have been just an accident where the dude didn't want to admit it.
It was a slow leak, it would have taken several weeks to drain the air. I guess there are no dash cams onboard ISS to show who did it. One thing clear, it had to be done while in orbit.

Why did it have to be done in orbit? A theory I read was that it happened during testing at the base in Kazakhstan. The operative accidentally drilled the hole and covered up by using filler. The kludge failed at some point during the spacecraft launch, or after docking.

Originally posted by @deepthought
Why did it have to be done in orbit? A theory I read was that it happened during testing at the base in Kazakhstan. The operative accidentally drilled the hole and covered up by using filler. The kludge failed at some point during the spacecraft launch, or after docking.

That's certainly possible, but wouldn't forensic evidence still be in the hole where silly putty or some such was used to plug it up, if it was sucked out of the vacuum side, wouldn't there be some kind of debris from the stuff still in the hole and maybe some on the outside if a space walk was performed looking for such evidence? Obviously, if such left over debris was found, it most likely would not have come from the astronauts on board since that stuff would probably not be present on board, or some different formula used for such instant patches. I imagine for the nonce, duct tape would probably work just fine till a permanent patch was installed. Or electrical tape. It's only a two mm hole so there wouldn't be much vacuum force on it at whatever the PSI rating is, what 7 or 8 PSI?
Which looks like about 14 grams of force or 1/2 ounce on the hole if I did my arithmetic right😉 Doesn't look like a lot of force so some kind of tape would work fine till help arrived in the form of good glue, like Torr Seal where you would put tape on the inside, to a space walk to the outside and mix the two Torr Seal epoxy parts together and put it in the hole and it will set in about a day, problem done.
We use Torr Seal for vacuum leaks in our cleanroom equipment all the time. I wonder if Torr Seal was included in the set of goodies shipped up? I certainly would have included a few tubes of the stuff. After that stuff sets it is probably stronger than the material of the hole itself and an ounce or so of force would be nothing to that stuff.

Originally posted by @fabianfnas
ISS took a leak in space...

Drum roll, laughter from drunken audience😉

BTW if nobody heard of Torr Seal, it is an epoxy specially designed to not be permeable to gasses used in a vacuum system where for instance, instead of using that you used plumbers putty which could be a temporary solution but some small amount of air would diffuse through the putty which would mean there would still be a slow (MUCH slower) leak but a leak nonetheless.

Torr Seal epoxy is designed to neither emit its own internal gasses or allow diffusion through its own material. It would be more like someone doing a welding job of pure steel or aluminum.

In the vacuum system world, there are several ways to prevent leaks, one common one is just an O ring clamped to a properly fitted holding device, a clamp ring.

Most people use an O ring grease, an atomically thin layer of vacuum grease to help the O ring seal to possible roughness in the metal O ring clamps, one such is called Apiezon grease, a very high (several grades in fact) of diffusion rate greases.

I worked at an IBM facility where the engineers there said if you need Apeizon or some such O ring grease there is something wrong, the material of the O ring itself should be able to make a good seal.

But most vacuum folks would take some Apiezon O ring grease and coat the O ring with a thin layer so microscopic roughness in the clamp rings would be filled with that tiny bit of grease.

Apiezon grease is specially formulated to not allow the diffusion of air across just the grease interface and there are some of these greases much better than others in that regard so you have to tailor the grease to the expected value of the vacuum being used.

In my semiconductor machine applications, we may get down to minus 8 torr range which for most semiconductor work is a decent but not perfect vacuum.
Apiezon has a diffusion rate that goes down at least ten times better than that so for such vacuum systems Apiezon works well.

However, there are other vacuum greases like those made by Dow corporation that can work with mechanical vacuum pumps just fine but would allow enough diffusion to spoil a minus 8 level vacuum, causing a permanent slow leak but that would be fine for a roughing pump which operates down to the micron range, like a few millitorr of pressure, where such Dow company greases work just fine.

But for the highest vacuum levels like what is needed for particle accelerators even Torr Seal would be like an open door so they have to use solid metal compression seals where there is a MUCH MUCH lower level of diffusion through vacuum joints so they can get down to minus 12 Torr levels or better. I think the air around ISS is around minus 14 Torr or so, much better than even the best particle accelerators and I envision particle accelerators on the moon for instance where all the guts are just out in the open.

Accelerator magnets and beam lines and such never needing the massive casings used in any vacuum system regardless of the Torr level achieved so an accelerator on the moon would be a LOT cheaper and a LOT less mass than anything on Earth. Just an aside😉