Substitute Soyuz arrives at area station
WASHINGTON — An uncrewed Soyuz spacecraft released to change a destroyed Soyuz arrived at the Intercontinental Area Station Feb. 25.
The Soyuz MS-23 spacecraft docked with the station’s Poisk module at 7:58 p.m. Eastern, a number of minutes in advance of timetable. The spacecraft had launched two days earlier on a Soyuz-2.1a rocket from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. In its place of a crew, it carried about 430 kilograms of cargo to the station.
Soyuz MS-23 was at first to launch a replacement crew of two Russian cosmonauts and a single American astronaut to the station in March. These plans adjusted soon after the Soyuz MS-22 spacecraft docked to the station professional a coolant leak in mid-December that Roscosmos afterwards concluded built it infeasible for it to return the crew to Earth as initially prepared.
Roscosmos and NASA declared in January that Soyuz MS-23 would start without a crew in February. It would change Soyuz MS-22, which will return to Earth without a crew in March. That will preserve the primary Soyuz MS-22 crew of Sergey Prokopyev, Dmitri Petelin and Frank Rubio on the station for many added months. Roscosmos said Feb. 25 they predicted the trio, initially set to return on Soyuz MS-22 in March immediately after 6 months on the station, to as a substitute appear back again in September on Soyuz MS-23.
Roscosmos blamed the Soyuz MS-22 leak on a micrometeoroid impact, a getting that NASA recognized in January when the companies introduced their selection to start Soyuz MS-23 without the need of a crew. Having said that, a different coolant leak on the Progress MS-21 cargo spacecraft docked to the station Feb. 11 prompted new queries about that rationalization, notably following Roscosmos mentioned “external influences” appeared to result in the Development leak.
“It’s nevertheless an ongoing assessment. They’re still using a really close glimpse at all of the details they have on spacecraft to consider and recognize if there is any popular cause or anything at all else that could have been a causal aspect in owning those two radiator panels leak,” mentioned Dana Weigel, NASA ISS deputy program supervisor, at a briefing a handful of hours following the docking to talk about the upcoming Crew-6 mission to the station.
She added that Roscosmos was sharing information and facts with NASA. That investigation is limited to telemetry from the spacecraft and exterior observations by cameras on the ISS, since the services module of the Progress and Soyuz spacecraft, in which the leaks happened, does not return to Earth. “When you have a problem like that, it tends to consider a little bit for a longer time to evaluate and seem as a result of every little thing.”
