Uncrewed Russian craft fails to dock with ISS, will make second attempt tomorrow

By Georgina Torbet Published August 25, 2019

The Soyuz MS-14 spacecraft is pictured during its first docking attempt early Saturday. NASA

An uncrewed Russian spacecraft had issues docking with the International Space Station (ISS) on Saturday. The craft is still in orbit and will make a second attempt at docking on Monday night.

Recommended Videos

The Soyuz MS-14 craft was launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on Wednesday, August 21, at 11:38 p.m. EDT, and made a total of 34 orbits of Earth before attempting to dock with the ISS. However, as the craft approached the ISS at 1:36 a.m. EDT on Saturday, the Russian team overseeing the maneuver decided to abort the docking because the craft could not lock on to its target on the station’s Poisk module.

The craft withdrew to a safe distance from the ISS while Russian controllers investigated. The early results of the investigation showed the issue may have been due to the station’s part of the Kurs automated rendezvous system, rather than a fault with the Soyuz. To address the problem, Russian space agency Roscosmos will send instructions to the ISS crew to swap out the signal amplifier, a part of the docking system, to see if that fixes the target lock-on.

The craft will continue on its trajectory near to the station, and it will be close enough to dock again in 24 hours and 48 hours time. The plan is now for a second attempt at docking to take place on Monday night at 11:12 p.m. EDT. Instead of aiming to dock with the Posik module, the mini-research module which acts as the primary docking location for Soyuz and Progress logistics vehicles, the craft will aim for the aft port of the Zvezda service module instead. The ISS team has already checked the Kurs docking system there and found it to be working perfectly.

Once the Soyuz docks with the Zvezda module, ISS astronauts Alexander Skvortsov of Roscosmos, Luca Parmitano of the European Space Agency, and Drew Morgan of NASA will put on their spacesuits and enter the craft, then pilot it over to the Poisk module and dock it manually. This process should take around 25 minutes and because the docking will be manual, the Kurs system is not required.

To see how the second docking attempt goes, you can watch live on NASA TV on Monday night from 10:30 p.m. EDT.

Georgina Torbet

Former Space Writer

Georgina has been the space writer at Digital Trends space writer for six years, covering human space exploration, planetary…

Topics

Cars

The Apple Car may be dead, but it became the foundation of Apple Intelligence

A decade of work on a canceled car project reportedly laid the groundwork for Apple Intelligence.

Apple Intelligence in Apple Car

The Apple Car may have never left the garage, but it apparently gave birth to Apple's AI ambitions. According to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman, Apple's canceled autonomous vehicle project, one that consumed more than a decade of work and over $10 billion before being scrapped in 2024, ended up laying the technological foundation for Apple Intelligence. In a rather ironic twist, one of Apple's most expensive failures may also become one of its most important long-term investments.

The Apple Car forced Apple to think like an AI company

Emerging Tech

Researchers hid a prompt injection inside a PNG, and AI fell for it

Hacker

AI coding assistants like Claude are becoming every developer's favorite coworker. They can review code, explain confusing functions, and even write entire features with a single prompt. But new research suggests that this growing trust could also become their biggest weakness.

A team of security researchers (professor Sudipta Chattopadhyay and researcher Murali Ediga) has demonstrated an unusual attack that doesn't target the AI model directly. Instead, it targets what the AI doesn't pay enough attention to during code reviews. Rather than hiding malicious instructions in lines of code, the researchers tucked them inside an image file. Since many AI review tools treat images as decorative assets rather than as something worth inspecting, the pull request can appear perfectly harmless and sail through the review.

Emerging Tech

AI has already fallen into the wrong hands and they’re using it to make bombs

Artificial intelligence has quickly become the go-to tool for everything from writing emails and summarizing meetings to helping students study or developers debug code. But the same technology that saves people time can also be misused, and a new report suggests that terrorist organizations are finding ways to do exactly that.

According to a research paper shared with The New York Times ahead of its publication, researchers found evidence that members of Boko Haram have been using popular AI chatbots to support both day-to-day activities and combat-related tasks. Interviews with 27 former members conducted in Nigeria over the past two years suggest that tools such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Grok, Meta AI, and DeepSeek were used to gather technical information, troubleshoot weapons, and even assist with planning attacks.