HOUSTON – A spacecraft packed with supplies for the astronauts on the International Space Station won’t arrive as planned on Wednesday after NASA said there was a problem with an engine burn needed to get the Cygnus spacecraft to the station.
On Sunday, Northrop Grumman’s Cygnus XL spacecraft launched to the space station on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral, Florida. The spacecraft is filled with 11,000 pounds of science experiments, research supplies and food for the orbiting laboratory.
NASA astronaut Jonny Kim was set to capture Cygnus at 6:35 a.m. EDT on Wednesday using the Canadarm2 with NASA astronaut Zena Cardman as backup support. However, early on Tuesday morning, as the spacecraft was completing a series of two burns designed to raise its orbit for rendezvous with the space station, one of its main engines stopped firing earlier than planned, according to NASA.
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“NASA and Northrop Grumman are delaying the arrival of the Cygnus XL to the International Space Station as flight controllers evaluate an alternate burn plan for the resupply spacecraft,” the space agency said in an update.
NASA said all other systems on Cygnus XL are performing as designed.
File photo: Northrop Grumman’s Cygnus spacecraft pictured in the grips of the space station’s Canadarm2 on Aug. 6, 2024.
A new arrival date and time have not been announced yet. Once the Cygnus docks at the station, it will be installed on the Unity Module, where it will remain until March 2026.
This is the 23rd commercial resupply mission with Cygnus. In 2018, Northrop Grumman acquired Orbital ATX, the previous operator of Cygnus.
Less than a week ago, a Russian Progress spacecraft docked at the ISS with 2.8 tons of supplies.
