Matthew Nelson
Northrop Grumman‘s Cygnus spacecraft has moved to begin a secondary mission after staying at the International Space Station for 109 days as part of a cargo delivery effort. The space rendezvous mission aims to demonstrate the simultaneous flight of two space vehicles carrying hosted payloads for a longer period of time.
NG-11 Cygnus will use the Slingshot CubeSat Deployer System that NASA astronauts installed on the spacecraft before the unberthing process took place along with a NanoRacks platform to field cubesats and will remain in low-Earth orbit to wait for another Cygnus vehicle that is scheduled for an October launch, the company said Tuesday.
Nicknamed S.S. Roger Chaffee, the NG-11 Cygnus vehicle brought 7,000 pounds of scientific equipment and crew supplies to ISS and departed from the station with more than 5K pounds of disposable cargo.
