ISS astronauts move capsule with Russian robot ahead of Soyuz arrival
Three ISS astronauts flew a Soyuz capsule, as if on a Sunday ride. They linked these at another point on the ISS to make room for a capsule containing a robot. An earlier coupling attempt was aborted.
Three ISS astronauts boarded the Soyuz MS-13 capsule overnight from Sunday to Monday and undocked the spacecraft from the International Space Station’s Zvezda module. With the capsule they flew about 38 meters in twenty-four minutes to another part of the ISS, the Poisk module. This reconnection, carried out by cosmonaut Alexander Skvortsov with a manual control system, was successful.
This ‘Sunday ride’ was not for fun. As a result of the maneuver, there is now room at the Zvezda module for a capsule to dock with the ISS. That will have to happen in the night from Monday to Tuesday with the Soyuz MS-14 capsule. It should have linked itself to the Poisk module on Saturday, but that automatic procedure was canceled after technical problems had arisen. The culprit would be an amplifier from a Poisk module radar system. This system guides upcoming Soyuz and Progress capsules through automated pairing procedures.
According to NASA, MS-14’s Kurs automated navigation system has been tested and works perfectly. With this, the capsule sends signals to the ISS to determine the distance, among other things, so that computers in the capsule can control the steering rockets to adjust the speed and orientation in relation to the station. Probably Kurs couldn’t target the clutch port because of the amplifier issues. As a result, cosmonauts from the ISS have aborted the docking procedure 90 meters from the ISS.
The Soyuz-MS-14 was successfully launched a few days ago and is the first Soyuz in 33 years to fly completely without a crew. This test flight was used, among other things, to determine whether the capsule is compatible with the upgraded Soyuz 2.1 booster. This new version of the launcher must be officially deployed from March. There are no flesh and blood people on board, but there are Skybot F-850. This Russian, ‘human-like’ robot is used, among other things, to collect data during the flight phase.