Lighting up the night sky, SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket blasted into orbit in spectacular fashion Thursday, completing a 32-hour rendezvous with the International Space Station to deliver 6,500 pounds of research gear, crew supplies and essential equipment. It started.
Onboard are fresh fruit, cheese, and pizza kits, as well as fun holiday treats for the crew, including chocolate, pumpkin spice cappuccino, rice cakes, turkey, duck, quail, seafood, cranberry sauce, and rice cakes. There are several,” said Vice Captain Dana Weigel. Space Station Program Manager at Johnson Space Center.
The launch from Kennedy Space Center’s historic Pad 39 took place at 8:28 p.m. EDT. This is approximately the moment when Earth’s rotation brings the pad directly into the space station’s orbital plane. This is a requirement for rendezvous missions with targets moving at speeds in excess of 17,000 miles per hour.
The ascent into space went smoothly, and Dragon began autonomous flight approximately 12 minutes after liftoff. If all goes well, the spacecraft will catch up with the space station on Saturday morning and await capture by the institute’s robotic arm.
The launch marked SpaceX’s 29th Cargo Dragon flight to the space station and Capsule C-211’s second mission. The first stage booster also made his second flight, returning to Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, scoring his 39th touchdown at SpaceX Florida and his 243rd overall.
However, the main purpose of this flight is to deliver research instruments and instruments to the space station.
Among the equipment delivered to the station will be an experimental high-speed laser communications package designed to send and receive data encoded in infrared laser beams at much faster speeds than is possible with traditional wireless systems. .
“It uses optical communications to send even larger and faster data packages from the space station back to Earth than we are capable of today, using small, low-power hardware.” said Megan Everett, senior scientist for the station program.
“This optical communication could greatly benefit the research we are already conducting on the space station by allowing scientists to see data faster and derive results more quickly. It could also greatly benefit the research we are already conducting on the space station. It could also help the medical community by sending packets of data.”
The equipment will be tested for six months as a “technical demonstration.” If it works as expected, it may be used as an operational communication link.
Another externally mounted instrument aboard Dragon is the Atmospheric Wave Experiment (AWE). It will take 68,000 infrared images per day to study gravitational waves at the perceptible interface between atmosphere and space, waves driven by the up-and-down interaction between gravity and buoyancy.
When the waves interact with the ionosphere, they “impact communications, navigation, and tracking systems,” said Jeff Forbes, associate principal investigator at the University of Colorado.
“AWE will take an important pioneering step toward measuring waves entering space from the atmosphere, and we hope to be able to link these observations to high-altitude weather in the ionosphere.”
And experiments conducted on the station will use 40 rodents to “better understand the combined effects of spaceflight, nutrition, and environmental stressors on[female]reproductive and bone health.” said Everett.
“There has been some previous research suggesting that there are changes in hormone receptors and endocrine function that negatively impact women’s reproductive health,” she says. “Therefore, we hope that the results of this study will have implications for the health of female astronauts during long-duration spaceflights, as well as for the reproductive health of women on Earth.”