Three members of the International Space Station Expedition 19/20 crew boarded their Soyuz return spacecraft attached to the station and moved it to a different docking port on Thursday, July 2. The operation was aimed at preparing the International Space Station to make room for docking of the Progress M-67 cargo supply spaceship to the docking port of the Zvezda-SM instrumentation compartment later this month.
FREE VIDEO: ALL-ACCESS SUBSCRIBERS: Launch of the Progress M-67 carrying several tons of supplied for the station is scheduled for July 24, 2009. Expedition 20 Commander Gennady Padalka and Flight Engineers Mike Barratt of NASA and Koichi Wakata of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency will undock the Soyuz TMA-14 return spacecraft from the Zvezda's instrumentation compartment station at 5:29 p.m. EDT and then backed away to about 30 metersfrom the station. Flying the spacecraft in manual mode, Padalka then meneuvered Soyuz underneath the station and positioned it for re-docking about 30 minutes later at the Pirs docking compartment which had been occupied by recently-departed Progress M-02M cargo vehicle earlier. While Padalka, Barratt and Wakata were aboard the Soyuz, Expedition 20 Flight Engineers Roman Romanenko of Russia, Bob Thirsk of the Canadian Space Agency and Frank De Winne of the European Space Agency monitored the move from inside the station. Their Soyuz return craft, the TMA-15, is docked to the Earth-facing port of the station's Zarya module. (The Spacearium / Space Media Corporation)
RETURN TO THE SPACEARIUM HOMEPAGE |
| Copyright © 2008, Space Media Corporation and The Spacearium, All Rights Reserved. All trademarks and copyrights on this page are owned by their respective owners. Space Media Corporation is a wholly owned company of the Aerospace Research & Engineering Systems Institute, Inc. |
