Northrop Grumman’s Cygnus spacecraft, launched last Monday, November 7, has just reached the International Space Station and was captured by the Canadarm2 robotic arm. Astronaut Nicole Mann, assisted by her colleague Josh Cassada, will soon begin the slow maneuver to move the Cygnus until it docks with the Station’s Unity module after about two hours.
Tomorrow, the International Space Station crew is scheduled to open the Cygnus spacecraft’s hatch and at that point, the cargo will be slowly brought to the Station. The NG-18 mission is almost accomplished because the Cygnus spacecraft can’t land and when it comes back into Earth’s atmosphere it will disintegrate. For this reason, it will be used to get rid of components that failed or that can’t be used any longer on the International Space Station: all of that will be loaded on the Cygnus and will disintegrate along with it.
The Cygnus named “S.S. Sally Ride” is scheduled to leave the International Space Station in a few months. In these cases, a tentative date for the cargo spacecraft departure is given, however, it can be modified because it also depends on other tasks that can have higher priority. Northrop Grumman is making its cargo spacecraft more resistant to space conditions to use them for more tasks after their departure.
The 18th of the official missions under Northrop Grumman’s contract with NASA is not without problems. It started a day later than scheduled because a fire alarm in the Northrop Grumman Mission Control Center shortly before the launch scheduled for Sunday caused a postponement postponed. Safety is the priority for both the staff who had to respond to the alarm with an evacuation of the premises and for the Antares rocket and the Cygnus space freighter, whose mission must be followed with total attention. In order to increase the mass of the cargo compared to previous missions, the Antares rocket was pushed more than usual, so it was more than ever necessary for the supervision of the operations to be precise.
A few hours after the launch, NASA reported that only one of the two solar arrays of the Cygnus spacecraft had deployed correctly. Over the course of the two-day trip, NASA and Northrop Grumman’s teams assessed the options after the attempts to fully deploy the second array failed. Eventually, the measurements of the energy generated mostly by the single fully active array showed that the spacecraft had enough power to maneuver safely and docking was authorized.
The next mission could begin in March 2023 but the date will only be established with precision in some time. This means there is plenty of time for Northrop Grumman engineers to look into the solar panel problem to understand why and prevent it from happening again in future missions.
