Early detection of the spacesuit malfunction could have prompted mission controllers to postpone Astronaut Luca Parmitano's spacewalk, thus preventing the potentially fatal event from occurring.
The potentially fatal incident, which the National Aeronautics and Space Agency (NASA) described as a "high visibility close call," happened during Parmitano's 6-hour spacewalk last July 16. Luckily, his partner, Astronaut Chris Cassidy, was able to pull him back.
After the incident, the federal agency postponed all non-emergent spacewalks until they find out the cause of the malfunction.
Initially, Cassidy thought that the leaking came from the spacesuit's cooling system. Succeeding analysis proved him wrong. Engineers found that it was a clogged filter. As of press time, they haven't determined the cause yet.
They also found that it was not the first time the incident had occurred. The first one happened a week before that on July 9.
In the 222-page investigation report, NASA officials said that if the first spacesuit water leak had been reported and discussed in detail, mission controllers would have recognized it as an "issue needed to be investigated further" before proceeding to the next spacewalk.
"I would say of all the EVA [extra-vehicular activity] issues we've encountered to date, this is probably the most serious one that we've encountered. I don't know of any other failures that have had this potential hazard associated with them," said Chris Hansen, chairman of the Mishap Investigation Board, to SPACE.com on Wednesday.
In the meantime, the federal agency has no intention on resuming non-emergent spacewalks -- not until they meet a few different goals.
"I think that's how we prevent Columbias and Challengers. We do it by these little, subtle things that don't see quite as big. We take them to their worst case conclusions and then we learn from that," said William Gerstenmaier, NASA's Human Exploration and Operations Mission Directorate associate administrator to SPACE.com.
