Preliminary Analysis Of Soil After Soyuz Accident Shows No Contamination By Fuel - Astana

The preliminary analysis of soil samples taken from the area where the stages of the Soyuz-FG launch vehicle and debris were found after Thursday's incident, has revealed that the soil was not contaminated by fuel, Kazakh Minister of Defense and Aerospace Industry Beibut Atamkulov said on Tuesday.

ASTANA (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 16th October, 2018) The preliminary analysis of soil samples taken from the area where the stages of the Soyuz-FG launch vehicle and debris were found after Thursday's incident, has revealed that the soil was not contaminated by fuel, Kazakh Minister of Defense and Aerospace Industry Beibut Atamkulov said on Tuesday.

On Thursday, the booster failed to launch the Soyuz MS-10 spacecraft toward the International Space Station (ISS) from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. Just minutes after the liftoff, the mission was aborted due to the booster's malfunction. The two-man crew escaped in a rescue capsule and returned on Earth unharmed. Immediately afterward, the Russian side, which had built the booster, launched an investigation into the incident.

"The [results] of the analysis that we have carried out are preliminary so far ... After all, we found the first stage [of the booster], then the second stage ... The [results] of the analysis there are perfectly clean. You know, [the accident took place at] an altitude of 47 kilometers [29 miles], the fuel burned out completely, let alone kerosene, it reacts with oxygen, it just burns out," Atamkulov told journalists.

The minister added that over 90 samples of soil had been taken.

The incident became the first failure of a manned space launch in modern Russian history and prompted Roscosmos to set up a special commission to find out the causes of the failure.