Washington: Four astronauts completed an operation to reposition a spacecraft at the ISS space station in a manoeuvre that took about an hour on Sunday.
Live images from the US space agency NASA showed Nick Hague, Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore, along with their Russian crew-mate Alexander Gorbunov, board the Crew Dragon capsule, undock it, and dock it again at a different location.
NASA’s control centres and those of the private space company SpaceX, owned by tech billionaire Elon Musk, coordinated the operation. The re-parking became necessary because the next supply flight to the ISS is scheduled to take place on Monday.
A forward-facing docking port is now available for this Dragon spacecraft, which is to bring supplies and materials for scientific experiments to the ISS. NASA says this was the fifth manned re-parking operation of a Dragon capsule at the ISS. As recently as May, a Dragon capsule had to make room for the Starliner spacecraft, which brought two astronauts to the ISS. (DPA)
