An empty Soyuz spacecraft will likely be despatched to the ISS subsequent month to deliver house two Russian cosmonauts and an American astronaut whose automobile was broken by a meteorite strike.
Russia stated Wednesday that it’ll ship an empty spacecraft to the International Space Station (ISS) subsequent month to deliver house three astronauts whose deliberate return automobile was broken by a strike from a tiny meteoroid.
The Russian area company, Roscosmos, made the announcement after analyzing the flight worthiness of the Soyuz MS-22 crew capsule docked with the ISS that sprang a radiator coolant leak in December.
Roscosmos and NASA officers stated at a joint press briefing that an uncrewed Soyuz spacecraft, MS-23, could be despatched to the ISS on February 20 to deliver Russian cosmonauts Dmitry Petelin and Sergei Prokopyev and NASA astronaut Frank Rubio again to Earth.
“We’re not calling it a rescue Soyuz,” stated Joel Montalbano, ISS program supervisor at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston. “I’m calling it a substitute Soyuz.
“Right now the crew is secure onboard the area station.”
MS-22 flew Petelin, Prokopyev and Rubio to the ISS in September after taking off from the Russian-operated Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.
They had been scheduled to return house in the identical spacecraft in March, however their keep on the ISS will now be prolonged by a number of further months.
“I’ll have to seek out some extra ice cream to reward them,” Montalbano joked.
MS-22 started leaking coolant on December 14—shortly earlier than Russian cosmonauts had been to start a spacewalk—after being hit by what US and Russian area officers consider was a tiny area rock.
Montalbano stated “the whole lot does level to a micrometeoroid” and never area particles, or a technical downside.
The government director of Human Space Flight Programs at Roscosmos, Sergei Krikalev, stated…
2023-01-12 04:22:31 Russia to ship rescue mission to area station
Article from phys.org