New Delhi: At 4.30 pm Thursday, Indian Air Force (IAF) Group Captain Shubhanshu Shukla will become the first Indian ever to set foot on the International Space Station (ISS). About 28 hours after liftoff, SpaceX’s Dragon capsule carrying four Axiom-4 crew members, including India’s Shukla, will dock at the space station, beginning the 14-day mission.
The Axiom-4 crew will join the seven-member permanent crew in a “welcome ceremony”, the US-based Axiom Space said in a statement ahead of Wednesday’s launch.
“During the 14-day mission, the astronauts are scheduled for a list of experiments and planned interviews and interactions,” the statement added.
The fourth Axiom spaceflight is aboard SpaceX’s newest Dragon capsule.
After successfully lifting off from NASA’s Kennedy Space Centre, the spacecraft entered low Earth orbit (LEO), from where it will perform a series of manoeuvres to get into the ISS’s orbit to reach it.
With the latest technology on board the SpaceX capsules, the crew’s travel, which would take a little more than a day, will be completely automated. The docking process will begin once the capsule reaches a distance of about 400 metres from the ISS.
The capsule will assess the docking progress at regular intervals—at pre-set distances of 20 metres, 10 metres and so on—to confirm the systems and the precise landing alignments.
The process will begin with the capsule capturing the ISS’s docking systems using its own docking systems. Once contact is made, the process of engaging the initial magnetic latches will begin. After this, Dragon will be locked, and a pressure-tight seal will be created around it before the post-docking leak checks are conducted.
NASA said the targeted docking for the Axiom-4 capsule will be the space-facing port of the station’s Harmony module.
The ‘final welcome’ will happen when the hatches open to the ISS, and the new crew members will float into the module. The incoming crew will undergo initial medical checks and safety briefings, after which the scientific experiments will be activated.
On Wednesday, when the Axiom-4 mission finally lifted off successfully, onlookers heaved a sigh of relief. After being scheduled initially for 29 May, the mission was postponed several times before it finally took flight on Wednesday.
One of the reasons for the launch being pushed back was a leak in the ISS’s Zvezda service module, a key component of the Russian Orbital Segment of the ISS. Zvezda was the first fully Russian contribution to the ISS and served as the “early cornerstone for the first human habitation of the station”.
“The module provides station living quarters, life support systems, electrical power distribution, data processing systems, flight control systems and propulsion systems,” NASA said on its website.
The module provides a communications system that includes remote command capabilities from ground flight controllers and a docking port for Russian Soyuz and Progress spacecraft.
A senior ISRO official who has been involved with the Axiom-4 mission said that the leak has only been temporarily plugged, but it is unlikely to impact the mission negatively. “The mission was given a go-ahead only after it was deemed completely safe,” the official said.
(Edited by Viny Mishra)
Also read: An Indian in space after 41 years. Axiom Falcon 9 takes off with Shubhanshu Shukla as mission pilot