Dubai, UAE – The Mohammed bin Rashid Space Centre (MBRSC) announced Friday that Emirati astronaut Sultan AlNeyadi will join in a mission to relocate the SpaceX Dragon spacecraft’s docking port on Saturday.
It will make way for the arrival of an upcoming cargo spacecraft on the International Space Station (ISS), local media reports said.
AlNeyadi 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 relocation is supported by the Mission Control Centre at NASA’s Johnson Space Centre in Houston and SpaceX in Hawthorne, California.
It is likely to free up Harmony’s space-facing port for the docking of the next Dragon cargo spacecraft set to launch in June, reports said.
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.
AlNeyadi along with his Crew-6 team launched from Cape Canaveral in Florida on 2nd March, to commence the longest Arab space mission in history.
He 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 Program is one of the projects managed by MBRSC under the UAE’s National Space Program and funded by the ICT Fund of the Telecommunications and Digital Government Regulatory Authority (TDRA).