The Soyuz MS-18 crew ship, pictured, will relocate from the Russian Rassvet module to the Nauka module on Sept. 28.
Credits: NASA
Three residents of the International Space Station will take a short ride aboard a Soyuz MS-18 spacecraft Tuesday, Sept. 28, relocating the spacecraft to prepare for the arrival of the next set of station crew members.
Expedition 65 flight engineers Mark Vande Hei of NASA and Oleg Novitskiy and Pyotr Dubrov of the Russian Space Agency Roscosmos will undock from the station’s Earth-facing Rassvet module at 8:21 a.m. EDT. They will dock again at the Nauka Multipurpose Laboratory Module at 9 a.m. This will be the first time a spacecraft has attached to the new Nauka module, which arrived at the station in July.
Live coverage of the maneuver will begin at 8 a.m. on NASA Television, the NASA app, and the agency’s website.
The relocation will free the Rassvet port for the docking of another Soyuz spacecraft, designated Soyuz MS-19, which will carry three Russian crew members to the station in October. Soyuz commander and cosmonaut Anton Shkaplerov of Roscosmos and spaceflight participants Klim Shipenko and Yulia Peresild are scheduled to launch to the station Tuesday, Oct. 5, from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.
This will be the 20th Soyuz port relocation in station history and the first since March 2021.
Vande Hei and Dubrov are scheduled to remain aboard the station until March 2022. At the time of his return, Vande Hei will have set the record for the longest single spaceflight for an American. Novitskiy, Shipenko, and Peresild are scheduled to return to Earth in October aboard the Soyuz MS-18 spacecraft.
For more than 20 years, humans have lived and worked continuously aboard the International Space Station, advancing scientific knowledge and demonstrating new technologies, making research breakthroughs not possible on Earth. As a global endeavor, 244 people from 19 countries have visited the unique microgravity laboratory that has hosted more than 3,000 research and educational investigations from researchers in 108 countries and areas.
Quelle: NASA
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Crew of ISS's Russian segment are testing, integrating robotic manipulator
A number of tests of the manipulator's systems and software are to be carried out to check its working capacity and deploy on the Russian segment of the ISS
The crew of Russia's segment of the International Space Station have been testing and activating the robotic manipulator European Robotic Arm (ERA), placed on the outer surface of the research module Nauka, Russia's space corporation Roscosmos said on Wednesday.
At the moment, the crew are activating the manipulator and integrating its software with the station's control system. A number of tests of the manipulator's systems and software are to be carried out to check its working capacity and deploy on the Russian segment of the ISS.
Russia's new module Nauka is meant for building up the technical and operating capability of the space station's Russian segment.
