Cygnus Enahnced

Mission Profile

Cygnus Enhanced is the upgraded version of Orbital Sciences' (later Northrop Grumman's) Cygnus unpiloted cargo spacecraft, featuring an extended cylindrical pressurized cargo module that increases cargo volume to approximately 27 cubic meters. First flown in December 2015, it operates under NASA's Commercial Resupply Services contracts to deliver supplies, science experiments, and hardware to the International Space Station. Cygnus is expendable — it departs the ISS loaded with waste, then performs a destructive reentry — but has also been used as a technology platform for external experiments and as a propulsive module for ISS reboost maneuvers. The Enhanced version became the standard Cygnus configuration following the original Standard variant.