A SpaceX Dragon cargo capsule met with the International Space Station (ISS) on Saturday, July 16, delivering more than 5,800 pounds (2,630 kilograms) of material to the orbiting lab.
robotic dragon Launched onto a two-stage Falcon 9 Rocket from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Thursday night, July 14. Falcon 9 sent Dragon into low Earth orbit, and the rocket’s first stage returned for a successful landing aboard the SpaceX drone carrier A Shortfall of Gravitas.
Dragon’s orbital tracking ended Saturday: The capsule docked with the ISS at 11:21 a.m. EDT (1521 GMT), with the two spacecraft flying 267 miles (430 kilometers) above the South Atlantic.
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The current mission is SpaceX’s 25th cargo flight to the ISS for NASA, hence known as CRS-25. (CRS stands for “commercial replenishment services.”) Since the company’s first operational ISS cargo mission in 2012, the number has grown at a slow but steady rate of about two per year.
SpaceX’s overall launch pace is of course much higher: CRS-25’s 30th takeoff Falcon 9 start so far this year. Backwards, Space X It launched just 31 missions in all of 2021. According to Benji Reed, SpaceX’s senior director of manned spaceflight, the company is set to double that number by the end of this year.
“This is blowing my mind,” Reed told reporters during a teleconference shortly after the Thursday night launch. “It’s pretty cool to think we’re sending three Dragons to the station this year,” Reed added, “including the first fully commercial mission to the station and a NASA crew mission.”
Two other Dragon missions removed this year – both in April – were crewed. one called ax-1transported paying customers to the orbiting lab on a flight organized by Houston company Axiom Space. the other Crew-4SpaceX’s fourth contract astronaut mission for NASA.
About half the weight of it Dragon Taken to the ISS on the CRS-25, it is dedicated to scientific research. NASA officials said the mission contributed to nearly 40 ongoing research projects at the orbital lab, and a handful more fell.
A study from the European Space Agency and the University of Florence in Italy, microgravity in the healing process of stitched wounds. Another, from the University of California at San Francisco, will examine the immune system’s relationship to aging and the body’s ability to heal itself. There is also research on the moon to examine a specific type of biopolymer concrete that could aid in the search for future building materials.
Loaded into Dragon’s trunk, the EMIT experiment – short for Earth Surface Mineral Dust Source Investigation – will be pulled from its stowage using the ISS’s robot arm and mounted on ExPRESS Logistics Carrier 1, an exposed external payload used for experiments and storage. EMIT will spend the next year studying the mineral composition of dust in Earth’s arid regions to help scientists better understand the planet’s global climate system.
While some of the CRS-25 cargo is not part of other ongoing research, it serves as a symbol of the science that drives everyday life on the space station, while also emphasizing how miraculous it is that we can run a scientific laboratory in space. all. Dina Contella, NASA’s ISS operations integration manager, highlighted other hardware aboard Dragon.
“One item is a spare dose pump critical to the toilet,” Contella said at Thursday’s press conference. Said. Dosing pumps are used prior to reclamation to process urine before the filter and turn it back into potable water – in case you forgot there’s no water in space and astronauts have to drink their own recycled pee.
“We’ve also released some brine processor mounting bladders,” Contella said. Said. “These allow us to save even more water from the urinary effort. [than] normal processing. Thus, the new pouches further enhance our ability to reclaim as much water as possible.” He added that both filters for the station’s drinking water dispensers are included in Dragon’s manifesto.
Dragon is expected to remain attached to the ISS for about a month and be loaded with equipment from the station before returning to Earth in mid-August with a splash of water off the Florida coast.
Editor’s note: This story was updated at 11:55 a.m. EDT on July 16 with news of the successful placement.
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