spacetoday.net: Soyuz moved to new ISS docking port

Posted: Tue, Jun 29, 2010, 6:19 AM ET (1019 GMT)
Soyuz TMA-19 during move (NASA)

Three ISS crewmembers took a brief flight in a Soyuz spacecraft, relocating the spacecraft to a new docking port. Fyodor Yurchikhin, Doug Wheelock, and Shannon Walker, who arrived on the station earlier this month on the Soyuz TMA-19 spacecraft, reboarded the spacecraft and undocked from the aft port of the Zvezda module at 3:13 pm EDT (1913 GMT). They maneuvered the spacecraft over to the port on the new Rassvet module, docking there 25 minutes later. The move frees up the Zvezda port for a Progress cargo spacecraft scheduled for launch on Wednesday. The port on the Rassvet module, added to the station during the STS-132 shuttle mission last month, doesn't yet have a Kurs automated docking system, hence the need for the manual flyover. A Kurs system will be added to that port during a July EVA. The brief Soyuz flight was delayed by a little over an hour because of problems locking one of the solar arrays in place for the move.