The last attempt failed, but this time it worked.
The American spacecraft Cygnus yesterday for the first time fully and successfully performed an operation to correct the orbit of the International Space Station. This was reported by NASA. “On Saturday, June 25, Cygnus, the Northrop Grumman spacecraft, performed the first limited orbit correction of the ISS,” the US space agency said in a statement.
The orbit correction maneuver took five minutes and one second, which changed the station’s location by about 800 m at perigee (the point of the lunar orbit closest to the Earth) and by 160 m at the apogee (the point of the lunar orbit farthest from the Earth). The last time NASA tried to use the Cygnus thrusters to correct the ISS orbit was on June 20, but then nothing worked. Cygnus will separate from the station on June 28, launch several cubesats into orbit, and burn up in dense layers of the atmosphere over the Pacific Ocean in about two weeks.
The spacecraft was launched on February 19 by an Antares launch vehicle from the spaceport on Wallops Island (Virginia) in the Atlantic Ocean. In the first stage of the carrier, Russian RD-181 engines developed by NPO Energomash were installed. Cygnus docked with the ISS on February 21, delivering more than 3.7 tons of various cargoes to the station: food, spare parts and equipment for scientific research, including studying skin aging in weightlessness and the effect of drugs on tumors, as well as a new system for growing plants in orbit
Earlier, Dmitry Rogozin said that the United States still had four RD-181 engines for the Antares rocket, and the Americans would still turn to Russia for new engines. The problem is quite acute, since Roscosmos is not eager to continue work on the ISS project after 2024, although NASA expects to use the ISS until 2030. Accordingly, if Russia withdraws from the project, the Americans will have to adjust the ISS orbit on their own. And you need to do this quite often.
Source: TASS
