“We are working with the station program, watching the Axiom-4 progress carefully. I think we need to undock that mission and the current target to undock is July 14 after the high beta period,” Steve Stitch, Manager, NASA Commercial Crew Program, told a press conference on the Crew-11 mission to the space station slated for July 31.

The Axiom-4 mission was launched from the Kennedy Space Centre at Florida on June 25 and the Dragon spacecraft docked at the International Space Station on June 26 after a 28-hour journey.

A “high beta period” for the space station refers to times when the angle between the ISS’s orbital plane and the sun is high, typically above 70 degrees.

During these periods, the ISS experiences near-constant sunlight, as it spends a greater portion of each orbit in daylight. This can cause overheating and requires careful thermal management by NASA.

Shukla and his Axiom-4 crew have witnessed 230 sunrises onboard the International Space Station (ISS) and travelled nearly 100 lakh kms in space at the end of two weeks on the orbital laboratory.

The Axiom-4 crew, comprising Shukla, Peggy Whitson, Slawosz Uznanski-Wisniewski and Tibor Kapu, also took their final off-duty day on the ISS.

The Axiom Mission 4 (Ax-4) crew has completed close to 230 orbits around Earth and travelled more than six million miles (96.5 lakh kms), an Axiom Space statement said.