MOSCOW, March 14. /TASS/. The Russian Mission Control Center has raised the International Space Station’s flight orbit before manned spaceflight takeoffs from Baikonur launch pad in Kazakhstan.
"At 00:25, Moscow time, the ISS orbit was adjusted as scheduled to create ballistic conditions before the flight of manned transport spacecraft under the program of the Russian segment of the ISS," the Mission Control Center in the Moscow suburbs said.
The orbit was raised with the help of the engines of the Progress MS-08 cargo craft docked to the station. Its engines worked for 108 seconds. An average height of the ISS’s flight orbit increased by 400 meters to about 404.5 kilometers, the Mission Control Center said.
The current crew of the International Space Station, Russian cosmonaut Anton Shkaplerov, Japanese astronaut Norishige Kanai and NASA astronaut Scott Tingle, arrived at the ISS on December 19, 2017. They will return to Earth on June 3, 2018.
The next manned spaceflight launch from Baikonur spaceport is scheduled for March 21.Soyuz MS-08 spacecraft to be launched from Baikonur will take Russian cosmonaut Oleg Artemyev and NASA astronauts Andrew Feustel and Richard Arnold to the International Space Station.