While NASA has suspended most of its work with Russia in light of the Ukraine conflict, the space agency will continue to collaborate with Russia on a "case-by-case basis," NASA spokesman Allard Beutel told Bloomberg.
The two countries will be working together on four missions that will implement Russian instruments on NASA spacecraft, Beutel said. Another collaboration will be for "space-based geodesy" to analyze and measure the Earth.
NASA will also be present at the 40th Committee on Space Research Conference in Moscow in August and plans to continue work on Russia's Spektr-RG mission, Beutel told Bloomberg.
While the American space agency announced that it was suspending most work with Russia because of international tension, NASA has only halted around 20 percent of its work with Russia, Yuri Karash, a member of the Tsiolkovsky Russian Academy of Cosmonautics, told Bloomberg by phone.
"The important thing is not current cooperation but future cooperation," he said. "All Russia's big space programs are supposed to be implemented with international help, but Russia actually doesn't have much to offer for future space missions."
American officials had said in a statement on April 2 that NASA was working to end Russian ties, appealing for more federal funding to send astronauts into space from America.
"NASA is laser focused on a plan to return human spaceflight launches to American soil, and end our reliance on Russia to get into space," the agency said in the announcement. "This has been a top priority of the Obama Administration's for the past five years, and had our plan been fully funded, we would have returned American human spaceflight launches--and the jobs they support--back to the United States next year."
The space agency cited Russia's violation of Ukraine's sovereignty in the announcement earlier this month. The suspension of communication between NASA and Russia means officials won't be visiting each other's countries or having meetings, teleconferences and email exchanges, USA TODAY reported at the time.
Two American astronauts are on the International Space Station after traveling there on the Russian spacecraft Soyuz.
NASA astronaut Steven Swanson recently arrived with Russian cosmonauts Alexander Skvortsov and Oleg Artemyev, joining NASA's Rick Mastracchio, Japan's Koichi Wakata and Russia's Mikhail Tyurin, who are currently living on the ISS and are scheduled to return to Earth in May. Swanson, Skvortsov and Artemyev are scheduled to remain in orbit on the ISS until September.
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