WASHINGTON, March 16 (Xinhua) — SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft carrying four crew members docked with the International Space Station (ISS) early Sunday, a step closer to bringing home stranded NASA astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore after nine months in space.
The spacecraft was launched on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida at 7:03 p.m. Friday Eastern Time (2303 GMT). After about 29 hours of flight, the spacecraft docked with the ISS at about 12:04 a.m. Sunday Eastern Time (0404 GMT).
The mission, codenamed Crew-10, carries NASA astronauts Anne McClain and Nichole Ayers, Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency astronaut Takuya Onishi and Roscosmos cosmonaut Kirill Peskov to the ISS. During their mission, Crew-10 is scheduled to conduct material flammability tests to contribute to future spacecraft and facility designs.
The crew will engage with students worldwide via the ISS Ham Radio program and use the program’s existing hardware to test a backup lunar navigation solution, said NASA.
Following a brief handover period, NASA’s SpaceX Crew-9 mission will return to Earth no earlier than Wednesday, carrying the stranded duo, along with NASA astronaut Nick Hague and Roscosmos cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov, NASA said. Williams and Wilmore have been stuck in space since last June due to technical problems of Boeing’s Starliner which took them to the ISS.
