A robotic Russian cargo craft will arrive at the International Space Station (ISS) early Saturday morning (Feb. 11), and you can watch the action live.
The robotic Progress 83 freighter is scheduled to dock with the station at 3:49 a.m. EST (0849 GMT) on Saturday, ending a two-day orbital chase.
Watch the off-Earth rendezvous live here at Space.com, courtesy of NASA, or directly via the space agency (opens in new tab). Coverage will begin at 3 a.m. EST (0800 GMT).
Related: How Russia’s Progress spaceships work (infographic)
Progress 83 launched atop a Soyuz rocket from the Russia-run Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan early Thursday morning (Feb. 9), carrying nearly 3 tons of food, scientific gear and hardware toward the International Space Station.
The freighter will dock Saturday with the rear port of the Zvezda module, on the Russian side of the ISS. Cosmonauts Dmitri Petelin and Sergey Prokopyev, who commands the current Expedition 68 mission aboard the orbiting lab, will monitor Progress 83’s automated approach.
“Afterward, the duo will wait for the pressure to equalize between the cargo craft and the station before opening the hatches and transferring the six-month supply of cargo,” NASA officials wrote in an update on Friday (opens in new tab) (Feb. 10).
Petelin, Prokopyev and NASA astronaut Frank Rubio arrived at the ISS in September 2022 aboard a Russian Soyuz spacecraft. That vehicle lost all of its coolant after an apparent micrometeoroid strike in December 2022, rendering it unfit to carry astronauts back to Earth except in case of emergency.
Russia’s federal space agency Roscosmos will launch an uncrewed Soyuz toward the ISS on Feb. 19 to serve as the trio’s new ride back to Earth. Their homecoming will be delayed considerably, however, from the original March date that was planned to the late September timeframe, NASA officials have said.
Petelin, Prokopyev and Rubio are currently sharing the ISS with four other astronauts, who are part of SpaceX’s Crew-5 mission for NASA. Crew-5, which arrived at the ISS in early October 2022, consists of NASA’s Nicole Mann and Josh Cassada, Japan’s Koichi Wakata and Anna Kikina of Roscosmos.
The Crew-5 quartet are scheduled to return to Earth next month.
Mike Wall is the author of “Out There (opens in new tab)” (Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Karl Tate), a book about the search for alien life. Follow him on Twitter @michaeldwall (opens in new tab). Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom (opens in new tab) or on Facebook (opens in new tab).
