Roscosmos finally launched the rescue ship Soyuz MS-23 to the ISS [VIDEO]
(Roscosmos / Screenshot YouTube)
Roscosmos, the Russian space agency, launched the Soyuz MS-23 spacecraft to the ISS without a crew, but with cargo.
The task of the ship is to return to Earth the crew of a failed Soyuz MS-22 and serve as a rescue ship for them.
Initially, the launch of the Soyuz MS-23 ship was planned on March 16, 2023.
NASA astronaut, Laral O’Hara and cosmonauts Oleg Kononenko and Nikolai Chub should fly on the ship.
However, the failure of the ship Soyuz MS-22 due to a hole in the thermoregulation system led to a revision of the scheduled program.
Then, Roscosmos decided to launch the Soyuz MS-23 ahead of schedule and without a crew.
This is not the first case of unmanned flights of the Soyuz ships, in 2019, the Soyuz MS-14 delivered a robot Fedor to the ISS.
THE MISSION
On February 23, the Soyuz-2.1A launch vehicle was launched from the site No. 31 of the Baikonur Cosmodrome
The rocket then withdrew the unmanned ship of the Soyuz MS-23 into near-Earth orbit.
The docking with the ISS in autonomous mode should take place on February 26.
The ship will deliver 429 kilograms of cargo for the crew and equipment to the station, both for the crew and for scientific experiments.
It is expected that the flight of the MS-23 Union will end in September 2023.
At that date, the astronaut Francisco Rubio and the cosmonauts Sergey Prokopyev and Dmitry Petelin will return to Earth with a delay of seven months.
Sources:
- YouTube:
- NASA SpaceFlight: https://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2023/02/soyuz-ms-23-launch/
- Steemit: https://steemit.com/hive-109160/@sarahjay1/the-russian-ship-progress-ms-21-undocked-from-the-iss-video
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