ISS will fly away from the Earth by 1100 meters to receive the Soyuz MS-17 spacecraft
The state corporation Roscosmos announced plans to perform the next correction of the orbit of the International Space Station (ISS): the maneuver will be carried out on July 29 at the expense of the power plant of the Progress MS-14 cargo vehicle.
The engines of the space “truck” will be turned on at 16:42 Moscow time and will run for 336.3 seconds (five and a half minutes). After that, the altitude of the station’s orbit will increase by 1100 meters and will be about 419.1 kilometers above the Earth.
This maneuver is necessary to form ballistic conditions before launching the Soyuz MS-17 manned transport vehicle. This spacecraft with the next long-term ISS expedition will be launched using the Soyuz-2.1a carrier rocket from site 31 of the Baikonur cosmodrome. The start is tentatively scheduled for October this year. Note that the main crew of the Soyuz MS-17 spacecraft includes cosmonauts from Roscosmos Sergei Ryzhikov and Sergei Kud-Sverchkov, as well as NASA astronaut Kathleen Rubins. The backup crew includes Roscosmos cosmonauts Oleg Novitsky and Pyotr Dubrov, NASA astronaut Mark Vande Hai. In addition, in the context of the spread of new coronavirus infection, a reserve crew has been identified: it included Roscosmos cosmonauts Anton Shkaplerov and Andrei Babkin.
