WASHINGTON
AFP
The attempted rendezvous of an unmanned cargo ship at the International Space Station will happen no earlier than Saturday following a technical glitch, NASA said Monday.
The rescheduling postpones the berthing of the Cygnus capsule by one week and will allow time for three new ISS crew members to launch aboard a Russian Soyuz from Kazakhstan on Wednesday, the US space agency said.
A software problem delayed the Cygnus spacecraft’s planned approach to the research outpost Sunday, and the manufacturers of the capsule have since figured out how to fix what they called a data format mismatch. “However, that process, together with the impending Soyuz crew operations, resulted in a tight schedule to the point that both Orbital and NASA felt it was the right decision to postpone the Cygnus approach and rendezvous until after Soyuz operations,” NASA said in a statement. Astronaut Michael Hopkins of NASA and Oleg Kotov and Sergey Ryazanskiy of the Russian space agency are to depart Kazakhstan at 4:58 pm (2058 GMT) Wednesday and arrive at the space station at 10:47 pm (0227 GMT Thursday).