Three people living and working on the International Space Station won’t be coming back to Earth this week as originally planned.
Because a Russian cargo ship failed to reach the ISS after its launch last month, NASA astronaut Terry Virts, European Space Agency (ESA) astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti and Russian cosmonaut Anton Shkaplerov will need to stay in space for a little while longer.
Mission managers are keeping the crewmembers in space while investigating what went wrong with the cargo ship's rendezvous with the ISS.
The three crewmembers currently on the Space Station will not come back to Earth until early June, according to a statement from the Russian Federal Space Agency (Roscosmos). Another crew of three was scheduled to launch to the station on May 26, but that launch has now been delayed until late July.
The Space Station's current crew shouldn't be negatively impacted by the delays, according to ESA and NASA.
"The six astronauts living and working on the orbital complex have enough supplies to last for many weeks regardless of the loss, so their wellbeing is unaffected by the change of schedule," ESA said in a statement.
The station is stocked with enough supplies to last the crew until fall 2015, NASA said.
Cristoforetti, for one, doesn't seem too disappointed by her unexpected extended stay in space:
Looks like it's not time to get my spacesuit ready yet... what a present! #MoreTimeInSpace http://t.co/i26pwWu8Oo pic.twitter.com/HzSuRjFQpE— Sam Cristoforetti (@AstroSamantha) May 12, 2015
Russia’s cargo-carrying Progress ships are similar to the crew-carrying Soyuz capsules that transport astronauts and cosmonauts to and from the ISS. Progress crafts are designed to burn up in the atmosphere, while Soyuz vehicles are made to bring astronauts all the way back to Earth intact. Both spacecraft launch to orbit atop Soyuz rockets.
The Progress vehicle that launched on April 28 experienced a major malfunction just after reaching space. Russian mission managers are still in the process of figuring out the exact cause of the unmanned spacecraft’s failure, but a preliminary investigation suggests that an issue with the third stage of the Soyuz rocket, which fires to bring the craft from the outer part of the planet's atmosphere and into space, may be to blame for the failure.