MOSCOW. Jan 12 (Interfax) - The International Space Station's (ISS) orbit has been raised by nearly three kilometers to facilitate the changeover of Soyuz crewed spaceships in spring 2024, Russia's state space corporation Roscosmos said on Friday.
"The engines of the Progress MS-24 resupply spacecraft docked to the Zvezda service module of the Russian ISS segment were activated at 7:30 p.m. Moscow time. According to preliminary information from the space mission control of Roscosmos's TsNIIMash Central Research Institute of Machine-Building, they functioned for 1,053.7 seconds and increased the station's velocity by 1.65 m/s," it said.
The ISS's average orbit has been raised by 2.9 kilometers to 418.53 kilometers, it said.
Expedition 70 crewmembers currently working on the ISS include Roscosmos cosmonauts Oleg Kononenko, Nikolai Chub, and Konstantin Borisov, NASA astronauts Jasmin Moghbeli and Loral O'Hara, European Space Agency (ESA) astronaut Andreas Mogensen, and Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) astronaut Satoshi Furukawa.