The Cygnus cargo spacecraft could reach the space station with just one solar panel: NASA

A Northrop-Grum­man rock­et suc­cess­ful­ly launched on Nov 7 and placed a Cygnus car­go ship named SS Sal­ly Ride into orbit. But after suc­cess­ful­ly enter­ing orbit, the space­craft, car­ry­ing more than 3,700 kilo­grams of car­go bound for the Inter­na­tion­al Space Sta­tion, was only able to deploy one of its two solar arrays. NASA says it will attempt to dock with the space sta­tion with­out deploy­ing the oth­er solar array.

After ini­tial attempts to deploy the sec­ond array failed, NASA and Northrop Grum­man decid­ed not to deploy it. “Cygnus has suf­fi­cient ener­gy to ren­dezvous with the space sta­tion on Wednes­day, Novem­ber 9th. Northrop Grum­man is work­ing close­ly with NASA to mon­i­tor and eval­u­ate the space­craft ahead of tomor­row’s sched­uled arrival, acqui­si­tion and instal­la­tion on the space sta­tion,” NASA said in a press statement.

Teams from the space agency and the pri­vate aero­space com­pa­ny are now work­ing togeth­er to under­stand why the sec­ond array was not deployed as planned. They will close­ly mon­i­tor the space­craft pri­or to its arrival, cap­ture, and instal­la­tion on the space sta­tion. Addi­tion­al inspec­tions of the Cygnus space­craft will be con­duct­ed after acquisition.

Cygnus car­go

The car­go ship is loaded with over 3.7 tons of research mate­r­i­al, crew mate­r­i­al and hard­ware. The main research effort being con­duct­ed by Cygnus is a Bio­Fab­ri­ca­tion Facil­i­ty (BFF) designed to print organ-like human tis­sue in the space sta­tion’s micro­grav­i­ty environment.

For a long time, sci­en­tists and med­ical pro­fes­sion­als around the world have been work­ing to use bio­log­i­cal 3D print­ers to pro­duce usable human organs that can be used for trans­plants. But print­ing the tiny struc­tures found in human organs has proven dif­fi­cult with Earth­’s gravity.

Accord­ing to NASA, the BFF aboard Cygnus could act as “a step­ping stone in a long-term plan to man­u­fac­ture entire human organs in space using sophis­ti­cat­ed bio­log­i­cal 3D print­ing techniques.”

Along­side the BFF, the Cygnus space­craft is con­duct­ing stud­ies to bet­ter under­stand mud flows after wild­fires, the impact of micro­grav­i­ty on ovar­i­an cells, and an exper­i­ment to see if plants grown in space can adapt to micro­grav­i­ty and pass these abil­i­ties on to their seeds . It also car­ries the first satel­lites of Ugan­da and Zimbabwe.