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Russian Freight Replenishment trips to the International Space Station have become such a predictable and predictable thing that even NASA is rarely bothering to reap the benefits, but the resupply mission of today is not the same. It deserves some attention. The ship, called Progress, took off from its launch site in Kazakhstan just before 10 pm. GMT and arrived at the space station a few hours later. The total time between launching and docking was three hours and 40 minutes
Now, if you do not follow the minutia of space travel, it might look like a number, so to give you a little background the previous record was five hours and 39 minutes. This last mission managed to shave two hours of record time, which is pretty wild.
So, how did they do it? Well, the details are a little vague about the end of Russia, but the bottom line is that the Russian space agency is now using an updated navigation system on its replenishment missions. This new system is apparently much better than anything they used before, and this has helped make the trip a lot more efficient, thus reducing the time it takes for the arrival of its vehicles to the Space Station.
The navigation system has certainly helped, but the speed at which a cargo ship can reach the space station depends on a number of different factors, including the position of the station itself on the orbit earthly. It can sometimes take up to two days for the freighter to escape to the space station as it sails around the Earth, but the stars seemed to align this time and constituted a race supply perfect and fast.
unmanned, but the Russian space agency hopes to use this optimized route for future manned journeys to the space station. This will certainly be good news for astronauts, as they would ideally like to spend as little time as possible within the cramped confines of the crew capsule.
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