On April 5 at 11:00 UTC, Astronauts Hopkins, Glover, Walker, and Noguchi of the Crew-1 Dragon Resilience climbed back into their spacecraft and undocked.  But they aren’t coming back to Earth — not just yet, anyway. Commander Michael Hopkins flew the spacecraft around 90 degrees to the International Docking Adapter-3 (IDA-3) port on the zenith, or space-facing, side of Node 2 on the ISS. In the reference frame of the ISS, Node 2 is the front of the ISS. The reason for this move was to free up the IDA-2 port on the forward side of Node 2 for the upcoming Crew-2 spacecraft. The Crew-2 spacecraft is only programmed to dock on this port, so the Crew-1 spacecraft needed to move.

All four astronauts suited up and boarded the spacecraft for the relocation in case of an emergency that would prevent it from being able to dock again. It’s standard practice for all crewed spacecraft relocations to suit up and be prepared to return to Earth if something goes wrong when changing parking spaces. Fortunately, they had no problems and after 45 minutes of free flight Dragon Resilience docked to IDA-3.

Another reason for the move is the upcoming CRS-22 mission. This Cargo Dragon will be bringing up a pair of new solar panels for the ISS and the Canadarm cannot reach the Dragon’s trunk if it is docked at IDA-2, so it will dock at IDA-3 in June 2021.

According to Scott Manley, this was only the third time a crewed spacecraft had docked to Pressurized Mating Adapter 3 (which IDA-3 is attached to). The others were Endeavour on STS-97 and Atlantis on STS-98 in 2000 and 2001, respectively.

More Information

NASA press release

NASA blog