The launch of the Falcon-9 launch vehicle with the SpaceX Dragon spacecraft to the International Space Station (ISS) will take place in normal mode, the recent powerful solar flare did not affect the plans. This was announced on October 29 by the head of the NASA manned program, Kathy Luders.
"We were monitoring the situation, our specialists from the ISS program monitored what was happening together with employees from SpaceX. During the joint observation, we did not identify any problems with either the mission's rocket or with other vehicles on the Ground," Luders said at a press conference.
The launch of the mission to the ISS will take place on October 31 from launch pad 39A at the Cape Canaveral Cosmodrome in Florida. The ship is scheduled to dock with the station on November 1.
The crew includes NASA astronauts Tom Marshburn, Raja Chari and Kayla Barron, as well as European Space Agency (ESA) astronaut Matthias Maurer. They will spend about six months on the ISS.
On October 28, scientists recorded a maximum X-class flare on the Sun. The process of strong X-ray radiation from the sun began at 18:17 Moscow time and lasted 31 minutes. The index of flare activity on the star has been raised to the orange level.
The next day, the Laboratory of X-ray astronomy of the Sun of the Physics Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences said that a cloud of magnetic plasma was moving towards the earth after increased solar activity, which from October 30 would cause the largest magnetic storms in several years.
