UAE: The tense 23 minutes before astronaut AlNeyadi's arrival on ISS

UAE astronaut Sultan AlNeyadi, along with his Nasa SpaceX Crew-6 mates, safely arrived at the International Space Station (ISS) at 10.40am (UAE time) on Friday, despite a brief delay due to a faulty sensor on one of the hooks used for docking.

After blasting off from Kennedy Space Centre in Florida at 9.43am on Thursday, the autonomous-flying Crew Dragon Endeavour spacecraft that carried AlNeyadi and his Crew-6 colleagues – Nasa mission commander Stephen Bowen, Nasa pilot Warren Hoburg, and Roscosmos cosmonaut Andrey Fedyaev – made a 24-hour journey to reach few hundred metres away from the orbiting space laboratory.

The start of the docking procedure was supposed to be 30 minutes ahead of schedule – at 9:43am (UAE time), according to an initial tweet by SpaceX – but it fell behind as the Crew Dragon was making its final approach to the station.

At 9.43am, when Crew Dragon was only 20 metres away from the ISS, an alert came from a micro-sensor of one of the 12 hooks that were used for docking.

Docking put on hold

The ground control teams investigated the alarm and called for the ‘holding’ of the space capsule at 20 metres away from the ISS. Nasa said grounds teams had two hours to conduct troubleshooting.

During this time, SpaceX tweeted: “Dragon and crew are healthy, all 12 docking hooks are open ahead of docking, and teams are testing a software override for a faulty sensor on one hook. Dragon can hold for ~ 2 hours in this position and maintain re-rendezvous capability.”

Nasa commentators who were doing a live webcast of the rendezvous also said there was no tension at all felt by the crew. While the ground stations were conducting a manual software override, Crew-6 have lifted their visors and all four of them were relaxed inside the Dragon Endeavour, looking at the ISS from their touchscreen monitors.

Software override

The issue was finally resolved after 23 minutes, following a manual software override activated by ground teams. Crew-6 put their visors down and Crew Dragon resumed its rendezvous with ISS.

Crew Dragon Endeavour docked on the ISS shortly after 10.40 am (UAE time), about 25 hours after launch from Nasa’s Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida. The coupling was confirmed and both the ISS and Endeavour orbited in tandem at an altitude of 28,000, about 420km above Earth across the coast of East Africa, according to Nasa.

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