Two US astronauts, a Russian astronaut and a United Arab Emirates astronaut safely boarded the International Space Station (ISS) on Thursday , as their SpaceX spacecraft approaches a rendezvous with the orbiting laboratory, NASA said.
SpaceX’s autonomous Crew Dragon capsule is expected to reach space and dock shortly after 1:15 a.m. EST (0615 GMT) on Friday, nearly 25 hours after launch from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida.
Control of the spacecraft will be transferred from SpaceX mission control near Los Angeles to NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston when Crew Dragon is ready to dock with the ISS.
The four-man team is expected to spend six months on the ISS conducting more than 200 experiments and experiments. technology, ranging from research on growing human cells in space to controlling combustion in microgravity.
Some of the research will help pave the way for future long-term missions to the Moon and beyond under NASA’s Artemis program, its successor to Apollo, the US space agency said.
The mission, known as Crew 6, is the sixth longest ISS team SpaceX has flown for NASA since the private rocket company founded by billionaire Elon Musk began sending American astronauts to the tournament in May 2020. Twitter status.
SUBMARIERS AND ENGINEERS
The latest crew was led by Stephen Bowen, 59, a one-time US Navy submarine officer who has spent more than 40 days in orbit as a veteran of three Space Shuttle flights and seven space shuttle missions. walking Fellow NASA astronaut Warren “Woody” Hoburg, 37, an electrical engineer, computer scientist and designated business executive, made his first flight. .
NASA’s SpaceX Crew-6 mission, including NASA astronauts Stephen Bowen and Woody Hoburg, the United Arab Emirates Sultan Al-Neyadi and Russian cosmonaut Andrey Fedyaev, launched to the International Space Station from the Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral , Florida, US, March 2, 2023. REUTERS/Joe Skipper
The mission of Crew 6 was also notable for the inclusion of UAE astronaut Sultan Alneyadi, 41, only the second person from his country to fly into space and the first to be launched from US soil as part of a part of long space.
The orbit of the 6-four crew is the Russian cosmonaut Andrey Fedyaev, 42, as Alneyadi is an engineer and flight engineer assigned to be a mission specialist for the team.
Fedyaev is the second cosmonaut to fly on a U.S. spacecraft under the renewal of space sharing signed in July by NASA and the Russia’s space agency Roscosmos, despite rising tensions between Washington and Moscow over Russia’s aggression in Ukraine.
The Crew 6 team will be escorted to the space station by seven people currently on the ISS – three NASA crew members, including commander Nicole Aunapu Mann, the first American woman to fly in space, along with three Russians and a Japanese astronaut.
The seven are expected to end their mission and leave space this month. Four will return in the SpaceX Dragon they rode to orbit in October, and three others will ride home in a Russian Soyuz spacecraft that flew empty to the ISS this week since replacing one that sprung a cold water while anchored at the station in December.
The launch of Crew 6 came 72 hours after an earlier attempt to postpone the countdown in the early hours of Monday morning due to four faulty engine fluid flow. NASA said the system worked fine after replacing a filter and cleaning the lines.
The launch was finally launched without a hitch. But a fault was also found in one of the 36 keys connected to the twelve hooks used to fasten the nose of the crew’s box to the ISS, but there is enough redundancy in that system that there is no problem by anchoring or closing the nose. expected, said NASA and SpaceX officials.
The launch and meeting coincided with the fourth anniversary of SpaceX’s first “Demo-1” flight of the Dragon spacecraft to the ISS and back in 2019.
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