Moscow. October 1st. INTERFAX.RU – The US company SpaceX's Cargo Dragon reusable spacecraft is supposed to splash down in the Atlantic on Friday Moscow time, according to the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).
It successfully undocked from the International Space Station (ISS) on Thursday. It is expected that after the spacecraft has been de-orbited, its descent capsule will make a soft landing in the Atlantic near Florida on Thursday at 11:00 pm US East Coast time (Friday at 06:00 Moscow time).
Cargo Dragon will deliver about 2.2 tons of cargo to Earth, including the results of scientific experiments carried out on the ISS.
It is currently the only ISS supply spacecraft capable of returning cargo to Earth.
In total, the Cargo Dragon spacecraft stayed on the ISS for a month. It was launched into orbit on August 29 by SpaceX's Falcon 9 launch vehicle, launched from the Cape Canaveral launch site in Florida. A day later, on August 30, it successfully docked with the ISS, delivering to the station more than three tons of food, as well as equipment and materials for scientific experiments by the station's crew.
This is the 23rd flight of the SpaceX “truck” to the ISS and the third mission of the modified version of the spacecraft – Cargo Dragon 2, which is capable of delivering 20% more cargo to the ISS, and can also autonomously dock with the station without the help of the traditional grip with the Canadarm2 manipulator arm for subsequent mooring as the previous option.
The new cargo ship is designed for five flights to the ISS and back instead of three in the framework of the missions of the previous Cargo Dragon “trucks”. This ship can stay at the station for 75 days, compared to 40 days in the previous version.
The launch of the spacecraft in the Cargo Dragon 2 version was carried out under the second contract between NASA and SpaceX to supply the station. From October 2012 to August 2021, SpaceX carried out 23 launches of Cargo Dragon cargo ships to the ISS. One of them (in 2015) ended in failure due to the crash of the Falcon 9 launch vehicle.
Currently, the ISS crew consists of Roskosmos cosmonauts Oleg Novitsky and Pyotr Dubrov and NASA astronaut Mark Vande Hai, who arrived on the ISS on April 9 on the Soyuz MS-18 spacecraft, and also arrived on the ISS on the Crew Dragon-2 spacecraft on April 24 NASA astronauts Megan MacArthur and Shane Kimbrough; European Space Agency (ESA) astronaut Thomas Pesce; and JAXA astronaut Akihiko Hoshide.
