Speedy astronauts make fastest trip yet to the ISS

Victoria Jaggard, physical sciences news editor

(Image: NASA/Carla Cioffi)

Now you can get to the International Space Station in less time than it takes to fly from London to New York.

A Russian Soyuz capsule usually takes at least two days to rendezvous with the ISS, because of the carefully timed dance of manoeuvres that must take place for a spaceship to safely meet the orbiting laboratory. Using a new launch process, three astronauts have now made the trip in just under 6 hours.

Russian cosmonauts Pavel Vinogradov and Alexander Misurkin and NASA astronaut Chris Cassidy launched at 20:43 GMT on 28 March from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. Soaring high above the western coast of Peru, they successfully docked with the space station at 02:28 GMT on 29 March - a flight time of just 5 hours, 45 minutes.

After a slight delay getting the pressure equalised between the two craft, the Soyuz hatch opened at 04:35 GMT. With a flurry of hugs and camera flashes, the record-setting spacefarers greeted the three crew members already aboard the ISS.

The Soyuz itself has not been supercharged and wasn't flying any quicker than normal. The shorter time allowance simply required that mission managers had to be more precise. When a Soyuz capsule enters orbit, it is on an orbital path a bit lower than the space station's, which means it circles the Earth faster. As the craft closes in on the ISS, a series of thruster burns boosts the capsule into the right orbit for docking.

Getting Soyuz to match the station's altitude and speed is a tricky business. If the capsule has a couple of days before docking, the thruster burns can be spaced out over 34 orbital laps. Shrinking the time between launch and docking gives the astronauts just 4 orbits to meet up with the ISS, according to NASA. The speedier meeting also means the space station has to do some of the work. On 21 March an uncrewed cargo vehicle already docked with the ISS fired its thrusters to shift the station about 4.8 kilometres higher, putting it in the right position to meet the Soyuz craft.

"Conducting a single-day launch-to-docking takes considerable amounts of planning and maneuvering of the space station in order to set both the station and the Soyuz on the proper orbit so they can chase each other," says NASA spokesman Joshua Buck at the agency's headquarters in Washington DC. "It also requires a compressed timeline for the Soyuz crew, with them having to conduct two days' worth of operations within 6 hours."

For safety reasons the astronauts must stay in restrictive pressurised space suits during the faster trip, but the 6-hour journey drastically reduces the time they have to spend in the cramped Soyuz capsule, as well as the amount of food and fuel they need for the trip.

Now that fast-track launches have been shown to work for Soyuz flights, ISS managers can decide whether to use the method on a case-by-case basis, says Buck. He adds that SpaceX's Dragon capsule will continue to take the slow road to the space station.

Source: http://feeds.newscientist.com/c/749/f/10897/s/2a246ad0/l/0L0Snewscientist0N0Cblogs0Cshortsharpscience0C20A130C0A30Cspeedy0Eastronauts0Emake0Ethe0Efas0Bhtml0Dcmpid0FRSS0QNSNS0Q20A120EGLOBAL0Qonline0Enews/story01.htm

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