Cygnus' ships docked at the international space station

On July 16, Cygnus, a private transport spacecraft, "landed" the International Space Station (ISS) successfully after a two-day flight to provide food, scientific equipment and some. Small satellites . for astronauts working on stations, according to Reuters.

>>>Cygnus cargo ships successfully assembled with the ISS station

According to the US Aeronautics and Space Agency (NASA), the unmanned aircraft of Orbital Sciences Company (USA), when it reached ISS (orbit about Libya for about 418km) was used by astronauts. Canadarm2 robot arm " grabbed" and pulled back to connect to the space station at 17 36 minutes on July 16 (Vietnam time).

This Cygnus spacecraft was named Janice Voss in memory of the astronaut five times flying into the space shuttle on the US shuttle, who died in 2012 because of cancer.

Cygnus - Janice Voss ships on Antares two-story rocket launchers leaving the launch pad at NASA's Wallops Missile Launching Center on Wallops Island, on the Atlantic coast in Virginia (USA) at 12:52 on July 13 ( American time).

ISS robot arm pulls Cygnus ship to station - (Photo: NASA)

Reuters said that after the ISS Harmony module ship, Steven Swanson space station commander and five colleagues will step into the ship to transport 1,630kg of goods including food, supplies and equipment. get science .

In addition, there were 28 small shoe box-sized satellites of private company Planet Labs (USA), designed to record the Earth image of the goods transferred by this ship. They will be deployed this summer from a small satellite launcher located in Japan's Kibo module.

"Our goal is to record the entire Earth every day and put them online so everyone can access them , " Reuters quoted Robbie Schlinger, co-founder of Planet Labs, a San Francisco-based company. - speak before the ship Cygnus takes off.

Cygnus - Janice Voss will stay at a US $ 100 billion space station built by 15 countries until mid-August. After that, it will bring waste from the station and be burned when flying into the atmosphere. land.

It is known that this mission is the second commercial flight of eight ships of Cygnus to deliver goods to ISS, according to NASA's $ 1.9 billion contract with Orbital Sciences. The first trip was conducted in January 2014 with Cygnus - Gordon Fullerton.

In addition to Orbital Sciences, SpaceX Company of the internet billionaire Elon Musk (USA) also obtained a $ 1.6 billion contract signed in 2008 with NASA for 12 Dragon's commercial flights to ISS.

So far, SpaceX has carried out three commercial flights of Dragon ships carrying goods to ISS in October 2012, March 2013 and April 2014. The Dragon Ship's fourth mission is scheduled to take place on August 8, 2014, while Cygnus' third mission is scheduled to take place on October 3, 2014.

Unlike the Cygnus that was burned in the ISS's waste atmosphere, the SpaceX Dragon ship could return to Earth and the company was building a spaceship that could bring people into orbit.