Editor TLN
March 3 () –
An international crew of four members arrived on March 3 at the International Space Station in the NASA’s sixth private rotation mission with Space Xcalled Crew 6.
NASA astronauts Mission Commander Stephen Bowen and Pilot Woody Hoburg, along with UAE (United Arab Emirates) Astronaut Sultan Alneyadi, and Roscosmos Cosmonaut Andrey Fedyaev completed their journey aboard the SpaceX Dragon spacecraft , called Endeavour, after taking off the day before from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
The spacecraft docked at 0640 UTC to the Harmony module of the orbital complex, when it was orbiting the east coast of Somalia at 418 kilometers. Crew members opened the hatch between the space station and the pressurized docking adapter at 0845 UTC and then opened the hatch to Dragon.
FAULTY HITCH SENSOR
Docking was slightly delayed while mission teams completed resolution of problems of a faulty docking hook sensor on Dragon. The NASA and SpaceX teams verified that all docking hooks were in the correct configuration, and SpaceX developed override software for the faulty sensor that allowed the docking process to continue successfully, reports NASA.
Crew 6 joins the Expedition 68 crew of NASA astronauts Frank Rubio, Nicole Mann and Josh Cassada, as well as JAXA (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency) Koichi Wakata, and Roscosmos cosmonauts Sergey Prokopyev, Dmitri Petelin and Anna Kikina.
For a brief period of time, the 11 crew members will live and work together in space until Crew 5 members Mann, Cassada, Wakata, and Kikina return to Earth a few days later.
The experiments planned by the new crew will include studies on how certain materials burn in microgravity, research with tissue chips on the functions of the heart, brain and cartilage, and an investigation that will collect microbial samples from outside the space station.
