Commander Sergei Zalyotin in a video broadcast from Mir. Photo: MirCorp

The Mir cosmonauts' efforts to find and repair a small leak in the space station are paying off, with the internal pressure now stabilizing after a sealing plug was installed on the Spektr module's hatch.

Sergei Zalyotin and Alexander Kalery have been performing a step-by-step search for the small leak since arriving on Mir earlier this month isolating the station section by section in order to pinpoint its location.

The leak is very small, and has never posed a problem for the mission. Mir's previous crew first detected it in 1999, but those cosmonauts were not able to locate the leak before leaving the station last August.

The now-plugged hatch separates the unpressurized Spektr module from the rest of the pressurized Mir station. Spektr has been unpressurized since 1997, when an unmanned Progress cargo re-supply spacecraft ran into the module during a docking maneuver.

Repairing the leak is part of the first phase of work for the new Mir cosmonauts as they as they prepare the station for its extended life as a commercial and scientific facility in space.

The leak-related repair and monitoring were not the only activities performed by the crew today. They also worked with the Biostoikost materials science experiment.