Emirati astronaut Al Neyadi to be part of crew dragon relocation on ISS

The Mohammed Bin Rashid Space Centre (MBRSC) on Friday announced that astronaut Sultan Al Neyadi will join in a mission to relocate the SpaceX Dragon spacecraft’s docking port on Saturday, to make way for the arrival of an upcoming cargo spacecraft on the International Space Station (ISS).

Al Neyadi will take part in the mission along with the Crew-6 members Nasa astronauts Stephen Bowen and Woody Hoburg and Roscosmos cosmonaut Andrey Fedyaev.

The live coverage of the mission will start at 15:00 UAE time and will be broadcast on https://mbrsc.ae/live/. The Crew-6 crew members will undock from the space-facing port of the space station’s Harmony module at 15:10 UAE time. The spacecraft will dock again at the station’s forward Harmony port at 15:53 UAE time.

The relocation, supported by the Mission Control Centre at Nasa’s Johnson Space Centre in Houston and SpaceX in Hawthorne, California, will free up Harmony’s space-facing port for the docking of the next Dragon cargo spacecraft set to launch in June. The zenith port on Harmony will allow the Canadarm2 robotic arm easier access to the International Space Station Roll-Out Solar Arrays, or IROSAs, that will arrive on SpaceX’s 28th commercial resupply mission for Nasa for installation through a series of spacewalks.

This will be the third port relocation of a Dragon crew spacecraft, following previous relocations during the Crew-1 and Crew-2 missions.

Al Neyadi along with his Crew-6 team launched from Cape Canaveral in Florida on March 2, to commence the longest Arab space mission in history. 

Al Neyadi also recently became the first Arab to undertake a spacewalk during Expedition 69, along with NASA astronaut Stephen Bowen.

During the spacewalk, which lasted 7 hours and 1 minute, they successfully completed a series of preparatory tasks which involved routing power cables, as a precursor to the installation of the iROSA.

The UAE Astronaut Programme is one of the projects managed by MBRSC under the UAE’s National Space Programme and funded by the ICT Fund of the Telecommunications and Digital Government Regulatory Authority (TDRA), which aims to support research and development in the ICT sector in the UAE and promote the country’s integration on the global stage.

WAM