spacetoday.net: ISS orbit boosted

ISS orbit boosted

Posted: Tue, Dec 5, 2006, 7:55 AM ET (1255 GMT)
STS-115: ISS after undocking (NASA)

Several days after a previous reboost effort was aborted, a Russian spacecraft raised the orbit of the ISS late Monday in preparation for the arrival of the space shuttle. A Progress spacecraft docked to the ISS fired its thrusters for 23 minutes Monday afternoon, raising the station's orbit by an average of 8.5 kilometers. A similar maneuver last week was aborted just over a minute after it started, apparently because computer systems controlling the burn had not taken into account changes in the station's distribution of mass caused by assembly work on the station during the previous shuttle mission. The reboost puts the station in the desired orbit for docking with the shuttle Discovery, scheduled for launch on the evening of December 7.