A malfunction in the rocket fairing of the Soyuz launch vehicle led to an incident during the docking of Russia's Progress MS-16 cargo spacecraft to the International Space Station (ISS) in February, the general director of the Progress space rocket center, Dmitry Baranov, said on Saturday
BAIKONUR (Kazakhstan) (Pakistan Point news / Sputnik - 10th April, 2021) A malfunction in the rocket fairing of the Soyuz launch vehicle led to an incident during the docking of Russia's Progress MS-16 cargo spacecraft to the International Space Station (ISS) in February, the general director of the Progress space rocket center, Dmitry Baranov, said on Saturday.
"The commission will work until April 30. The problem is in the nose rocket fairing," Baranov told reporters.
Progress MS-16 was supposed to dock at Russia's Pirs compartment in an automatic mode on February 17, however the process had to be performed in a manual mode because the cargo spacecraft deviated too much from the intended trajectory. Russian cosmonaut Sergey Ryzhikov successfully performed the manual docking of the spacecraft.
A source in the space industry previously told Sputnik the the docking malfunction had been caused by damage to the antenna and elements of the Kurs-NA system after the nose fairing of the Soyuz-2.1a launch vehicle was dropped during placing of the spacecraft into orbit. This was later confirmed by images released by NASA Johnson Space Center.
