WASHINGTON (Reuters). – The Cygnus capsule today became the second freighter developed by a private company that carries supplies to the International Space Station (EEI) to successfully engage it, reported the U.S. space agency, NASA .
After a week of delay, the probe created by the company Orbital Science arrived on the ISS, where the crew managed to dock the space laboratory Harmony module by a robotic arm at 12:44 GMT, NASA said in a statement .
The crew opens
Monday afternoon the hatch to begin downloading the approximately 590 kilograms of Cygnus carrying supplies, including food and clothing.
Orbital Science
thus becomes the second private company completes a cargo mission to the ISS after the Californian company SpaceX, which is a year sending supplies through Dragon capsule.
Unlike Dragon, which is designed to return to Earth after completing its mission, Cygnus is scheduled to disintegrate shortly after being decoupled from the ISS, something planned for late October.
spacecraft blasted off on September 18 in Virginia (USA) and his arrival was originally scheduled for last Sunday 22, but was delayed due to a software failure before the initiation approach maneuvers.
was expected that the delay lasted only two days, but eventually the NASA engineers chose to wait until the launch and docking of the Soyuz TMA-10M on Wednesday to resume collection activities Cygnus.
This was a key test mission for Orbital Science, which premiered last April its first rocket successfully Antares and has a contract of 1,900 million with eight other NASA missions to transport supplies to the ISS.
company president, David W. Thompson, in a statement welcomed the success of the mission, which took five years of “hard work” and was confident to carry out regular missions to the ISS “later this year, as soon”.
For its part, NASA Administrator, Charles Bolden, said the arrival of Cygnus is a “milestone” in the space agency’s strategy to delegate to private companies transporting supplies to the ISS, following the end of the age of the ferries.
“While trade allies demonstrate their new systems to get to the station, we at NASA remain focused on technologies to reach an asteroid and Mars,” Bolden said in a statement.
Such distribution of tasks was devised by U.S. President Barack Obama, to further space exploration while “it is hoped the competition of private capital to reduce the cost of carrying astronauts and cargo” to the ISS, explained today the White House counsel, John P. Holdren.
Cygnus capsule was captured by the robotic arm Canadarm2 by flight engineers of the expedition ISS 37th, Luca Parmitano and Karen Nyberg.
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