SpaceX’s ambitious mission of launching cargo ship has aborted in its final approach to the International Space Station (ISS) due to a technical glitch. SpaceX Dragon supply ship, which onboard a Falcon 9 rocket took wings on 19th February from NASA’s historic Launch Complex 39A, located at the Kennedy Space Centre, on Merritt Island in Florida, United States was aborted due to the technical error in GPS navigation system.
As suspected by the flight controllers of SpaceX, the abort might have been caused by an erroneous “state vector” – the set of figures that characterises the orbit and trajectory of the spacecraft. However, up to now, the flight controllers are not fully convinced about the unexpected call off of the space ship. The abortion took place during the final approach of the spacecraft to the International Space Station (ISS).
On this context, Elon Musk’s owned space venture – SpaceX took to Twitter to express the fresh news regarding the Dragon Spacecraft. It tweeted:
“Dragon is in good health and will make another rendezvous attempt with the @Space_Station Thursday morning.”
It means, if the flight controllers and programmers successfully managed to diagnose the anomaly and get to the bottom of the issue, then Dragon cargo ship, loaded with some 5,500 pounds of tools and supplies will make another attempt to dock with ISS on Thursday morning.
Rob Navias, a spokesperson of NASA, the US-based space agency, who is also a partner of SpaceX for this mission said, “The engineers of SpaceX are trying hard to trace the glitches which are triggered by the wrong numbers, programmed in spacecraft’s Relative Global Positioning System hardware. However, Dragon and its Global Positioning System (GPS) hardware are in excellent shape. Once troubleshoot of the technical hiccups are done, Dragon Spaceship will take another effort to haven with ISS on Thursday morning.”
On 19th February morning, at 9:39 a.m ET (1439 GMT), SpaceX’s most-reliable Falcon 9 rocket, carrying ‘Dragon’ cargo ship – which measures 229-foot tall (70-meter), blasted off from the long-inactive 39A launch pad of Cape Canaveral. The cargo spacecraft was aimed to deliver 5,500 pounds of cargo and supplies to ISS’s onboard crews.