The debut mission of Northrop Grumman’s new jumbo cargo spacecraft did not go off with no hitch.
The corporate’s first “Cygnus XL” freighter suffered a thruster concern in orbit early Tuesday morning (Sept. 16), two days after launching towards the Worldwide House Station (ISS) atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.
In consequence, “the Cygnus XL is not going to arrive to the area station on Wednesday, Sept. 17, as initially deliberate, with a brand new arrival date and time underneath evaluation,” NASA officers introduced in an replace on Tuesday afternoon.
The Cygnus XL’s “essential engine stopped sooner than deliberate throughout two burns designed to lift the orbit of the spacecraft for rendezvous with the area station, the place it’ll ship 11,000 kilos of scientific investigations and cargo to the orbiting laboratory for NASA,” company officers added within the replace. “All different Cygnus XL techniques are performing usually.”
Cygnus XL is the newest model of Virginia-based Northrop Grumman’s Cygnus freighter. Earlier iterations hauled about 8,500 kilos (3,856 kg) to the ISS.
The present mission is called NG-23, as a result of it was purported to be the twenty third cargo effort that Northrop Grumman flies to the ISS for NASA. However the twenty second was canceled after the Cygnus was broken throughout transport to the launch web site.
Cygnus is one in every of three freighters that resupply the ISS, together with SpaceX’s Dragon capsule and Russia’s Progress automobile.
Cygnus and Progress are expendable, whereas Dragon is reusable. The NG-23 Cygnus XL — named S.S. William “Willie” McCool, after one of many astronauts who died within the 2003 Columbia area shuttle catastrophe — is slated to remain connected to the ISS till March 2026, when it’ll depart to dissipate in Earth’s ambiance.
