CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. - The crew of the International Space Station was largely confined to the Russian side of the outpost Thursday after an American-made airlock system spewed a foul odor into the U.S. half of the complex.
NASA officials said the strong, musty odor did not pose any health hazard to Russian station commander Yuri Onufrienko or U.S. flight engineers Carl Walz and Daniel Bursch, although the three men complained of slight headaches.
As a precaution, the station tenants spent the better part of their day in Russian-built crew quarters while ground controllers pumped the air on the U.S. side of the outpost through an onboard purifier.
"Flight controllers and medical operations folks want to run the air through that system twice before letting the crew come back in (to the U.S. segment) for any appreciable time," said John Ira Petty, a spokesman for NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston.
Petty said the unpleasant smell had been traced to a system inside the $164 million U.S. Quest airlock, one that is used to cleanse and recharge air scrubbers within U.S. spacesuits.
Walz and Bursch donned suits for a spacewalk carried out at the station Wednesday. The suits had been stored for months within the airlock and engineers suspect that filters within their scrubbers might have been tainted with mildew.
Officials said heat created during the air-scrubbing process after Wednesday's spacewalk likely created the pungent aroma.
Petty said the resulting smell was "a little bit like the odor you get when you crank up your heating system in your home for the first time in the fall."
To deal with the situation, the crew first shut down the spacesuit air scrubbers and then sealed off the American airlock from the rest of the station.
A hatchway separating the U.S. and Russian sides of the station was partially closed. And the station's ventilation system was temporarily tweaked to keep air on the U.S. side out of the Russian half of the complex.
Ground controllers then began pumping all the air in the U.S. segment through a purifier designed to remove any trace contaminants -- a process that takes about 13 hours.
Consequently, Bursch -- who normally bunks in the U.S. Destiny lab -- planned to spend the night with his two colleagues in the station's Russian crew module.
The U.S. side of the station, meanwhile, is expected to reopen for business Friday.
The smelly situation followed a five-hour, 47-minute spacewalk that was intended in part to test systems within the Quest airlock, which was delivered to the station last July.
Four spacewalks are to be staged from the orbital portal by a visiting shuttle crew in April, and NASA officials said the problem is not expected to stall plans for that mission.
Set for launch April 4, astronauts on that flight aim to deliver and install the central segment of an outpost truss that eventually will stretch 356 feet (108 meters) from end to end.
Four U.S. electric power towers and science laboratories being built by the European and Japanese space agencies ultimately are to be mounted to the massive truss, which will serve as the skeletal backbone of a growing station.
Launched Dec. 5, Onufrienko, Bursch and Walz are in the midst of a five-and-a-half-month tour of duty aboard the international station, which is a joint project of space agencies in the U.S., Russia, Europe, Canada, Japan and Brazil.
The fourth full-time crew of the station remains scheduled to return to Earth in mid-May aboard NASA's shuttle Endeavour.
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