A little while ago the SpaceX Dragon spacecraft was captured by the Canadarm2 robotic arm on the International Space Station. Norishige Kanai and Scott Tingle, assisted by their colleague Ricky Arnold, managed the operation then started moving the Dragon to the berthing point at the Harmony module. The cargo spacecraft blasted off last Monday.
Confirmation arrived that the Chinese space laboratory Tiangong 1 has fallen back to Earth. To be precise, at about 0.16 AM UTC it was destroyed over the Pacific Ocean. At the moment there are no information about possible damage caused by its fall but it’s possible that some pieces haven’t disintegrated.
Launched on September 29, 2011, the Tiangong 1 space laboratory was built to test a number of technologies needed to develop the Chinese space program. They concern docking systems, including automatic one, and the habitat inside it with the instruments needed to perform scientific experiments.
A little while ago the Soyuz MS-08 spacecraft, which blasted off about two days ago from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, has reached the International Space Station carrying three new crew members. The astronauts Drew Feustel and Ricky Arnold of NASA and the cosmonaut Oleg Artemyev of Roscosmos now complete the Expedition 55 crew.
A few hours ago the astronauts Mark Vande Hei and Joe Acaba and the cosmonaut Alexander Misurkin returned to Earth on the Soyuz MS-06 spacecraft, that landed without problems in Kazakhstan. The three of them spent a bit more than 5 months on the International Space Station, where they arrived on September 13, 2017 as part of Expedition 53.
