Early Friday morning (March 3), SpaceX’s Dragon Endeavour spacecraft carrying the 4 astronauts of the Crew-6 mission approached the Worldwide House Station (ISS).
Crew-6’s dramatic meetup with the house station, which culminated with a docking at 1:40 a.m. EST (0640 GMT) on Friday, was captured in a wide ranging time-lapse video created utilizing NASA footage.
The docking maneuver had been postponed by an hour whereas SpaceX labored a problem with a defective sensor related to one of many 12 hooks on Dragon that join the capsule to the house station. After a software program override was uploaded to Endeavour, the capsule was in a position to efficiently hyperlink up with the house station.
Associated: Dwell updates about SpaceX’s Crew-6 mission for NASA
The time-lapse video demonstrates the excessive drama of the off-Earth operation, exhibiting Endeavour because it approaches the ISS at an altitude of round 260 miles (418 kilometers).
Dominating the video is the picture of Earth, towards which Endeavour seems as a slowly rising grey speck as it’s filmed from the ISS. In different pictures, the Dragon craft is seen from above because it races over the tops of fluffy white clouds on Earth.
One other a part of the video exhibits the Dragon’s goal, the ISS, from the angle of the spacecraft, little doubt a reassuring sight for the Crew-6 astronauts — NASA’s Stephen Bowen and Warren “Woody” Hoburg, United Arab Emirates astronaut Sultan Alneyadi and cosmonaut Andrey Fedyaevsee.
The footage additionally offers a glimpse inside Endeavour because it makes its nail-biting method to the ISS with commander Bowen and pilot Hoburg on the helm. The video additionally demonstrates how house missions like Crew-6 are the results of an enormous collaborative effort, as pictures present the busy scene at mission management right here on Earth.
The hatch between Endeavour and the ISS was opened at 03:45 EST (0845 GMT) after the house station’s crew performed customary leak checks and after pressurization, based on NASA (opens in new tab).
Following this, the Crew-6 astronauts met up with present ISS occupants, the Expedition 68 crew of NASA astronauts Frank Rubio, Nicole Mann and Josh Cassada, in addition to Koichi Wakata of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Company and cosmonauts Sergey Prokopyev, Dmitri Petelin and Anna Kikina.
Cassada, Mann, Kikina and Wakata flew to the ISS on SpaceX’s Crew-5 mission in October 2022 and are scheduled to return to Earth in only a few days.
Throughout their six-month science mission, the Crew-6 astronauts will have interaction in a sequence of cutting-edge science experiments, together with checks designed to evaluate the consequences of long-term house missions on human well being.
The workforce may even use the Combustion Built-in Rack to check gasoline burning in microgravity, assessing the impact of altering numerous check parameters like airflow, oxygen focus, strain and radiation ranges.
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