NEW YORK, November 27. /TASS/. US SpaceX’s Cargo Dragon 2 spacecraft has successfully docked to the International Space Station (ISS).
The docking was aired live on NASA’s website on Sunday.
Cargo Dragon 2 lifted off from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida at about 2:20 p.m. ET on Saturday (10:20 p.m. Moscow time) and docked to the ISS 07:39 a.m. (3:39 p.m. Moscow time) on Sunday.
The spaceship carries two iROSA solar batteries to be mounted to the ISS’s surface on December 3 and 19 during a spacewalk by US astronauts.
Apart from that, onboard Cargo Dragon 2 are equipment and seeds for tomato growing experiments.
Besides SpaceX’s Cargo Dragon, supplies are delivered to the ISS by Northrop Grumman’s Cygnus spacecraft. However, Cygnus rockets burn up when reentering the atmosphere on their return to the Earth, along with the rubbish they take away from the ISS.
Currently, there are seven crew members onboard the ISS: Roscosmos cosmonauts Sergey Prokopyev, Dmitry Petelin (who is TASS’ special correspondent at the ISS) and Anna Kikina, NASA astronauts Nicole Mann, Josh Cassada and Frank Rubio as well as JAXA astronaut Koichi Wakata.