Unmanned commercial cargo ship reaches International Space Station
Reuters
2013-09-29
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An unmanned U.S. commercial cargo ship flew itself to the International Space Station on Sunday, completing the primary goal of its debut test flight before supply runs begin in December.
After a series of successful steering maneuvers, the Orbital Sciences Cygnus freighter parked about 39 feet from the station as the ships sailed 260 miles above the Southern Ocean south of Africa.
Ten minutes later, Italian astronaut Luca Parmitano and NASA's Karen Nyberg used the station's robotic arm to pluck the capsule from orbit and prepared to attach it to a berthing slip.
Cygnus' arrival had been delayed a week - first by a software glitch and then by the higher priority docking of a Russian Soyuz capsule ferrying three new crewmembers to the $100 billion outpost, a project of 15 nations.
An unmanned U.S. commercial cargo ship flew itself to the International Space Station on Sunday, completing the primary goal of its debut test flight before supply runs begin in December.
After a series of successful steering maneuvers, the Orbital Sciences Cygnus freighter parked about 39 feet from the station as the ships sailed 260 miles above the Southern Ocean south of Africa.
Ten minutes later, Italian astronaut Luca Parmitano and NASA's Karen Nyberg used the station's robotic arm to pluck the capsule from orbit and prepared to attach it to a berthing slip.
Cygnus' arrival had been delayed a week - first by a software glitch and then by the higher priority docking of a Russian Soyuz capsule ferrying three new crewmembers to the $100 billion outpost, a project of 15 nations.
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