Miami (EFE) 6 were received by the Expedition 68 crew from the orbiting laboratory.
Dragon Endeavor’s hatch opened at about 3:45 a.m. Eastern US time (8:45 a.m. GMT), after docking with the ISS’s Harmony module a couple of hours earlier, and while the station was about 418 km above the Indian Ocean, off the east coast of Somalia, according to NASA.
Subsequently, Stephen Bowen and Warren Hoburg, from the US agency, and mission commander and pilot, respectively, as well as specialists Sultan Alneyadi, from the United Arab Emirates space agency, and Andrey Fedyaev, from Russia’s Roscosmos, crew members of Crew-6, entered the ISS to begin a 6-month stay.
The docking was “slightly” delayed, as NASA pointed out in the mission’s blog, due to problems with a sensor in one of the 12 hooks of the capsule, a problem that was resolved after SpaceX proceeded to “an annulment of faulty sensor software that allowed the pairing process to continue successfully.”
It was precisely this same sensor that shortly after the launch of the mission, carried out early Thursday from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida (USA), produced problems with the opening of the upper cone of the capsule, while this was in their trajectory, a situation that was corrected when the ship switched to a backup system.
A mission of possible great incidence in the future
Crew-6 took off this Thursday after 2 postponements caused by technical reasons, the last of which occurred on February 27 just over 2 minutes after takeoff.
On the ISS, the crew of Crew-6 will perform more than 200 microgravity science experiments and maintenance tasks.
To study the effects that manned missions can have in space, astronauts will venture outside the ISS to collect samples from the station’s vents, checking to see if the ISS is releasing microorganisms into space, and if so, how many and how many. where they could travel
The results of this particular experiment could alter the design of future space missions and astronaut suits to limit possible contamination.
Crew-6, like NASA’s other Space X missions, will pave the way “for human exploration beyond low-Earth orbit and to improve life on Earth,” according to the US space agency.
NASA plans to send a manned mission to the Moon in 2024 as part of the Artemis program.