At 12.01 hours Ist 25 June, a crew capsule containing four astronauts, including the Indian group Captain Shubhanshu Shukl on his first space flight, lifted at the top of Falcon 9 from NASA space in Florida.
The elevator meant the beginning of the long-awaited Axiom-4 mission.
Starting was smooth. At a time when they completed two stages of missiles, the crew capsules – called Dragon – traveled for several thousand kilometers per hour.
The aim of the capsule was the International Space Station (ISS), which orbits the country approximately 400 km above the sea level. At the time of the elevator, Axiom Space, the company organizing this mission, Dragon said it would anchor with ISS in 28 hours.
Why does the spacecraft travel so fast that it needs 28 hours to get to a place that is a little more than the distance between Chennai and Bengalur?
It helps to imagine Tobolka and ISS as two racing cars on separate lanes of the same track rather than as a car that tries to go directly to the place of 400 km in advance.
Everything happens all over the country and choreography is dictated by orbital mechanics and strict safety rules.
To share the ISS lane, the capsules must correspond to its altitude and vector vector. This is achieved by raw speed and timing.
Rather than passing the energy of the crews radially outwards, it is mostly sideways. Going straight 400 km would leave the dragon with virtually zero side speed, which caused it almost immediately to return – like a ball that was fired.
The Falcon 9 will have a dragon vaulted to a low, slightly elliptical parking orbit of about 200 km high. Its speed is around 27,000 km/h, which the capsule keeps just to prevent the spiral back down to the ground.
The ISS is also higher than this parking orbit, approximately 400 km, and therefore dresses the country a little slower to avoid spiral. While the ISS takes about 92 minutes for the Earth to go around the Earth, the dragon starts to take about 88 minutes. By being lower than the ISS, Dragon is slowly lagging behind its orbit until the ISS has reached.
After logging in the dragon capsules, the dragon capsules will perform a number of small Thruster burns, aka phases of burns to first increase their apogee (point to its elliptical orbit, where the dragon is furthest from the ground) and then in its entire orbit.
Each of these burns is timed so that after completing several tracks, the dragon will end exactly where the ISS will be. This is somewhat like merging into the highway on the right departure, rather than leading directly to another car.
For the Axiom-4 mission, the mission planners designed a preliminary profile that lasted about 28 hours, or about 18 orbits. At the end of this profile, the Dragon Crew capsule would be on the right side of the ISS, where there is a free docking port and at a time when the ISS crew is awake.
As soon as Dragon comes to 30 km from the ISS, he moves to the “corridor” balanced with the ISS. From there, the rules require the capsules to move no more than a few meters per second. Once it is within 20 m from the ISS, the dragon will have to slow down to several centimeters per second.
There are points of standing in 400 m, 220 m, 20 mA 1 m from the ISS, where the dragon crew, including the captain of the Shukla-Terrible Group, is a designed mission pilot to have to conduct polls and control of Lidar and Lidar control. Although the sensor is incorrect in this process, the dragon will be required to retreat from the ISS along the pre -programmed path.
This intentional stimulation adds several hours to access the crew capsule to the ISS.
The fact that Axiom Space and NASA used SpaceX Crew crews for this mission is important. It allowed mission operators to choose a more conservative fuel-rich profile, which also allows the crew to complete the check-out, eat and sleep before intense docking.
Published – June 26, 2025 03:30
