MOSCOW, March 21 Ballistic conditions will not allow the Soyuz spacecraft MS-25″ will fly to the International Space Station using an ultra-short route in three hours, as planned if the launch on March 21 had not been postponed, a source in the rocket and space industry said.
The launch of the Soyuz MS-25 spacecraft was planned for 16.21 Moscow time on Thursday, but was canceled automatically a few minutes before the launch. It was assumed that the flight of the ship would take place according to the recently developed ultra-short two-orbit scheme (when the ship makes two revolutions around the Earth), and docking with the ISS would take place at 19.40 Moscow time on the same day.
«To implement a two-orbit rendezvous and docking scheme, appropriate ballistic conditions and a very precise correspondence of the ISS working orbit to the launch of the spacecraft are required. On March 23, such conditions will not exist,» the agency's interlocutor said.
He clarified that the flight will take place according to the traditional two-day pattern, during which the ship makes approximately 34 orbits around the Earth, and the flight itself takes about 50 hours.
After the launch was canceled on March 21, Roscosmos General Director Yuri Borisov said that the cause was a voltage drop in the chemical current source. The launch was postponed to a reserve date and is expected to take place at 15.36 Moscow time on March 23.
The main crew of the ship included Russian Oleg Novitsky, Belarusian Marina Vasilevskaya and American Tracy Dyson. Vasilevskaya will become the first woman in the history of Belarus to travel into space.
It was originally planned that Novitsky and Vasilevskaya would spend 12 days on the ISS and return to Earth on April 2 on the Soyuz MS-24 spacecraft, now docked to the station, together with the American Loral O'Hara, who arrived on it on September 15, 2023 of the year. Russian cosmonauts Oleg Kononenko and Nikolai Chub who arrived with her will spend more than a year at the station and return with Dyson on the Soyuz MS-25.
Свежие комментарии