Canadarm2 Releases Cygnus Supply Spacecraft from ISS

Cygnus, the first privately built commercial cargo spacecraft by the Orbital Sciences Corporation, was released by Canadarm2, the orbiting lab on Tuesday, Oct. 22. The spacecraft spent three weeks at the International Space Station.

On Monday morning, the spacecraft was depressurized and its hatches closed. It was dislodged on Tuesday, it flew above the Atlantic Ocean, east of Argentina and its engine will be fired at 1:41 p.m. EDT (5:41p.m.GMT) for the last time on Wednesday. It would self burn over the Pacific Ocean after it re-enters Earth's atmosphere.

The spacecraft launched at 7:31 a.m. EDT (11:31 a.m. GMT) on Sept. 18 loaded with supplies for the astronauts. The spacecraft had two modules, the Service Module (SM) and the Pressurized Cargo Module (PCM), which has a volume of 18 cubic meters.

The unmanned Cygnus was removed from the Harmony node, which fuelled the spacecraft with electrical power and electrical data, by flight engineers Luca Parmitano and Karen Nyberg.

Earlier, on Sept. 29, Cygnus spacecraft docked at the station with its supplies and was caught with  the robotic arm Canadarm2 by the flight engineer duo, Parmitano and Nyberg.

NASA and Orbital Sciences Corporation are bounded by a $1.9 billion contract. The corporation will be delivering eight more Cygnus-like spacecrafts to the space administration, according to a Yahoo News report.

 SpaceX, the California-based space transport company, is the other supplier to NASA. The company has a budget of $1.6 billion to fly 12 cargo flights to the station using its Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon space capsules. The company has already conducted two resupply missions using its Dragon cargo craft.

Presently, the Cygnus cargo module comprises of control hardware, power, avionics, communications and commands. It has twin fixed-wing gallium arsenide solar arrays on the outside, which are capable of producing 3.5 kilowatts of electricity. This spacecraft will be developed further in the future. Lightweight solar panels and a larger pressurized cargo module will be installed on it, reports Space.com report.