NASA officials admitted that they have never encountered a malfunction like what Astronaut Luca Parmitano experienced. Water bizarrely filled up his helmet during his six-hour spacewalk to do a maintenance work on the International Space Station. But there’s a video explaining what had happened. Thanks to Astronaut Chris Cassidy, Parmitano’s buddy.
Parmitano, Italy’s first spacewalker from the European Space Agency said that his head felt really wet, so the spacewalk was instantaneously halted.
“Scary situation,” that is how Cassidy, a veteran spacewalker who assisted Parmitano back to the Airlock, described the incident. “He had water filled up in his ear cups, and it started to creep into his eyes and covered his nose,” he noted.
Thinking the water accumulating in his helmet was from his drink-water bag, Parmitano consumed it, later realizing that it doesn’t taste the same. In the video, Cassidy explained the source of the leak-- the suit’s cooling system.
Cassidy described in the video, “In the back of the helmet’s neck hole, slightly to the left side of the body, there’s a slit in the rim that allows air to go through. This port links to the ventilation system, which blows air over the astronaut’s face. Somehow, water leaked out and made its way through that slit and into the helmet, where it began to collect in a kind of hard white plastic lining behind Parmitano’s head, soaking his hair. Soon, the water began to spill over the white plastic and float inside the helmet, raising the risk of drowning in the suit.”
"You can imagine, you’re in a fishbowl. So go stick your head in a fishbowl and try to walk around – that’s not anything you take lightly," NASA flight director David Korth said at the time.
Cassidy claimed that Engineers at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston have been working on finding out exactly what caused the leak into the helmet.
"The most important thing is that the suits are determined to be safe," Cassidy said, "so that whenever the next folks get outside, that everything works well for them."
