The Orbital ATK Cygnus spacecraft, launched on April 18, has just reached the International Space Station and was captured by Canadarm2 robotic arm. Astronaut Peggy Whitson, assisted by her colleague Thomas Pesquet, will soon begin the slow maneuver to move the Cygnus until it docks with the Station’s Harmony node after about two hours.
A little while ago Orbital ATK’s Cygnus spacecraft blasted off atop an Atlas V rocket from Cape Canaveral. After about 21 minutes it successfully separated from the rocket’s last stage went en route to its destination. This is its seventh official mission, called Orbital-7 or simply Orb-7 but also CRS OA-7, to transport supplies to the International Space Station for NASA.
Yesterday, NASA held a press conference to explain the latest news about the studies of alien oceans. The attention was focused on the two most popular underground oceans, the one in Jupiter’s satellite Europa and the one in Saturn’s satellite Enceladus. There are confirmations of plumes from Europa, also described in an article published in “The Astrophysical Journal Letters”. The presence of molecular hydrogen in the Enceladus ocean was announced, also described in an article published in the journal “Science”.
A little while ago the astronaut Shane Kimbrough and the cosmonauts Sergey Ryzhikov and Andrey Borisenko returned to Earth on the Soyuz MS-02 spacecraft, that landed without problems in Kazakhstan. The three of them spent more than five months on the International Space Station, where they arrived on October 21, 2016 as part of Expedition 49.
