The debut mission of Northrop Grumman’s new jumbo cargo spacecraft did not go off with no hitch.
The corporate’s first “Cygnus XL” freighter suffered a thruster subject in orbit early Tuesday morning (Sept. 16), two days after launching towards the Worldwide Area Station (ISS) atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.
Because of this, “the Cygnus XL won’t arrive to the house station on Wednesday, Sept. 17, as initially deliberate, with a brand new arrival date and time underneath assessment,” NASA officers introduced in an replace on Tuesday afternoon.
The Cygnus XL’s “foremost engine stopped sooner than deliberate throughout two burns designed to lift the orbit of the spacecraft for rendezvous with the house station, the place it should ship 11,000 kilos of scientific investigations and cargo to the orbiting laboratory for NASA,” company officers added within the replace. “All different Cygnus XL methods are performing usually.”
Cygnus XL is the newest model of Virginia-based Northrop Grumman’s Cygnus freighter. Previous iterations hauled about 8,500 pounds (3,856 kg) to the ISS.
The current mission is known as NG-23, because it was supposed to be the 23rd cargo effort that Northrop Grumman flies to the ISS for NASA. But the 22nd was canceled after the Cygnus was damaged during transport to the launch site.
Cygnus is one of three freighters that resupply the ISS, along with SpaceX’s Dragon capsule and Russia’s Progress vehicle.
Cygnus and Progress are expendable, while Dragon is reusable. The NG-23 Cygnus XL — named S.S. William “Willie” McCool, after one of the astronauts who died in the 2003 Columbia space shuttle disaster — is slated to stay attached to the ISS until March 2026, when it will depart to burn up in Earth’s atmosphere.
