ASTRONAUT Shubhanshu Shukla and three other crew members of the Axiom-4 mission are set to return to Earth from the International Space Station on July 14, NASA said on Thursday. “We are working with the station programme, watching the Axiom-4 progress carefully. I think we need to undock that mission and the current target to undock is July 14 after the high beta period,” Steve Stitch, Manager, NASA Commercial Crew Programme, told a press conference on the Crew-11 mission to the space station slated for July 31.

 

The Axiom-4 mission was launched from the Kennedy Space Centre at Florida on June 25 and the Dragon spacecraft docked at the International Space Station on June 26 after a 28-hour journey. A “high beta period” for the space station refers to times when the angle between the ISS’s orbital plane and the Sun is high, typically above 70 degrees. During these periods, the ISS experiences near-constant sunlight, as it spends a greater portion of each orbit in daylight. This can cause overheating and requires careful thermal management by NASA.

 

The Axiom-4 crew, comprising Shukla, Peggy Whitson, Slawosz Uznanski-Wisniewski and Tibor Kapu, also took their final off-duty day on the ISS. The Axiom Mission 4 (Ax-4) crew has completed close to 230 orbits around Earth and travelled more than six million miles (96.5 lakh kms), an Axiom Space statement said. With over 60 experiments across biomedical science, advanced materials, neuroscience, agriculture, and space technology, the Ax-4 mission includes the most research conducted on an Axiom Space private astronaut mission to date.