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US Cygnus spaceship docks to ISS with 3.7 tons of cargo

This is the 19th cargo delivery mission to the ISS carried out by Northrop Grumman as part of their contract with NASA

NEW YORK, August 4. /TASS/. The Cygnus cargo spaceship made by US company Northrop Grumman has docked to the International Space Station (ISS), according to a telecast on NASA’s website.

The spaceship docked at 5:52 a.m. EST (12:52 a.m. Moscow time). The spacecraft delivered 3.7 tons of cargo, including food and equipment for scientific experiments.

This is the 19th cargo delivery mission to the ISS carried out by Northrop Grumman as part of their contract with NASA. The spacecraft will remain docked to the station for a few months, after which it will undock from the ISS with a load of garbage and waste, re-enter Earth’s atmosphere and burn up when it does so.

Cygnus was launched on August 1 by a Northrop Grunman Antares carrier rocket equipped with RD-181 engines designed by Russia’s Energomash aerospace company. This was the last launch of the Antares spacecraft in this modification.

Roscosmos CEO Dmitry Rogozin said in an interview with the Rossiya-24 television channel in March 2022 that Russia’s state-run space corporation Roscosmos would halt deliveries and maintenance of Energomash-designed rocket engines in the United States. The ban applies to RD-180 and RD-181 engines that are used on US Atlas V and Antares launch vehicles.

Along with Cygnus, cargoes to the ISS are delivered by SpaceX’s Dragon spaceships.

The current crew on board the ISS includes Roscosmos cosmonauts Sergey Prokopyev, Dmitry Petelin (TASS special correspondent on the ISS), Andrey Fedyaev, NASA astronauts Frank Rubio, Stephen Bowen and Woody Hoburg, as well as United Arab Emirates’ astronaut Sultan al-Neyadi.

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