Orbital ATK’s space division (now part of Northrop Grumman Space Systems) and NASA jointly developed a new space transportation system to provide commercial cargo resupply services to the International Space Station (ISS). Under the Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) program, Orbital ATK designed, acquired, built, and assembled these components: Antares, a medium-class launch vehicle; Cygnus, an advanced spacecraft using a Pressurized Cargo Module (PCM) provided by industrial partner Thales Alenia Space and a Service Module based on the Orbital GEOStarsatellite bus.[5]
Production and integration of Cygnus spacecraft are performed in Dulles, Virginia. The Cygnus service module is mated with the pressurized cargo module at the launch site, and mission operations are conducted from control centers in Dulles, Virginia and Houston, Texas.[5]
This was the twelfth flight of the Enhanced-sized Cygnus PCM.[4][6] Northrop Grumman named this spacecraft after Piers Sellers, in celebration of his role in assembling the International Space Station.[2]
Aside from the orbital delivery, Cygnus performed the program's first operational reboost of the ISS. The space station's orbit needs to be changed from time to time as it naturally falls back in Earth's atmosphere.[9] The ISS will change its attitude by about 90 degrees before executing the Cygnus reboost on 18 June 2022.[10][11]
On 20 June 2022 at 15:20 UTC, Cygnus NG-17 gimbal engine was scheduled to fire for 5 minutes and 1 second but the firing was aborted after 5 seconds.[12]
On Saturday, June 25, 2022 at 17:42 UTC, Northrop Grumman’s Cygnus completed its first limited reboost of the International Space Station. Cygnus’ gimbaled delta velocity engine was used to adjust the space station’s orbit through a reboost of the altitude of the space station. The maneuver lasted 5 minutes, 1 second and raised the station’s altitude 1/10 of a mile at apogee and 5/10 of a mile at perigee.[13]
The new experiments that have arrived at the orbiting laboratory will inspire future scientists and explorers, and provide valuable insight for researchers.
^"ISS Research Program". Glenn Research Center. NASA. 1 January 2020. Retrieved 27 December 2020. This article incorporates text from this source, which is in the public domain.
Launches are separated by dots ( • ), payloads by commas ( , ), multiple names for the same satellite by slashes ( / ). Crewed flights are underlined. Launch failures are marked with the † sign. Payloads deployed from other spacecraft are (enclosed in parentheses).
This article incorporates text from this source, which is in the public domain.
