NASA recently live streamed the departure of a spaceship from the International Space Station (ISS), but it wasn’t Boeing’s Starliner, which is staying longer than expected at the orbital outpost due to technical issues.
On Friday, the station’s Canadarm2 robotic arm detached Northrop Grumman’s Cygnus spacecraft from the Unity module before gently nudging it away from the Earth-orbiting facility.
The crewless Cygnus vehicle arrived at the station five-and-a-half months ago, bringing with it 8,200 pounds of supplies, scientific investigations, commercial products, hardware, and other essential cargo.
.@northropgrumman’s Cygnus space freighter was released from the Canadarm2 robotic arm at 7:01am ET today, ending its five-and-a-half month stay at the orbiting laboratory. More… https://t.co/F55tLmJiXr pic.twitter.com/fge7xHiav6
— International Space Station (@Space_Station) July 12, 2024
The spacecraft’s final task will involve the Kentucky Re-entry Probe Experiment-2 (KREPE-2), which will take measurements to demonstrate a thermal protection system for spacecraft and their contents during reentry into Earth’s atmosphere, something that’s hard to replicate in ground simulations.
Cygnus has now executed a deorbit engine firing for a planned reentry in which the spacecraft — and all of the ISS garbage stuffed inside it — will safely burn up in Earth’s atmosphere.
Cygnus arrived at the space station at the start of February after beginning its journey atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket in a launch from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. It was Northrop Grumman’s 20th commercial resupply services mission to the station for NASA.
Meanwhile, the Starliner is staying docked at the ISS for way longer than expected. The spacecraft arrived at the station on its first crewed flight on June 6, but an issue with five of its thrusters, along with a number of helium leaks, has resulted in the mission being extended beyond the originally planned one week while engineers try to gain a greater understanding of what caused the issues.
In a live-streamed media conference last week, NASA astronaut Suni Williams, one of the two Starliner crew members, said: “This is a test flight, so we were expecting to find some things, and so we are finding stuff and we are correcting it.”
In a later update, Steve Stich, manager of NASA’s Commercial Crew Program, commented: “We’re taking our time on the ground to go through all the data that we have before we decide on the return opportunity.”
At the current time, no date has been set for the return of the Starliner and its crew, though there’s some expectation that it will fly home before the end of July.
