Roscosmos Experts Studying Bug That Occurred During Docking Of Cargo Spaceship To ISS

Specialists at the Russian state space corporation Roscosmos are analyzing the information about a malfunction that took place during docking of Russia's Progress MS-16 cargo spacecraft to the International Space Station (ISS), as a result of which the docking had to be done manually, a spokesperson for Roscosmos told Sputnik

MOSCOW (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 18th February, 2021) Specialists at the Russian state space corporation Roscosmos are analyzing the information about a malfunction that took place during docking of Russia's Progress MS-16 cargo spacecraft to the International Space Station (ISS), as a result of which the docking had to be done manually, a spokesperson for Roscosmos told Sputnik.

"We do not comment [on versions of the malfunction] until specialists, who are collecting and analyzing the information, complete their work," the spokesperson said.

Progress MS-16 was supposed to dock at Russia's Pirs docking compartment in an automatic mode on February 17, however docking had to be performed in a manual mode because the cargo spacecraft deviated too much from the intended trajectory. Russian cosmonaut Sergey Ryzhikov successfully performed the manual docking of the spacecraft.

The reasons for the failure are unknown. Roscosmos head Dmitry Rogozin previously said that the footage of Progress MS-16 during the launch could help understand the reasons of the emergency situation.