SpaceX’s Crew Dragon Freedom arrives at the International Space Station (ISS) early Saturday morning (January 20) with four astronauts from the commercial Ax-3 mission, which you can watch live .
Ax-3 launched on top of SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket on Thursday (January 18), beginning a nearly 36-hour orbital pursuit. The pursuit is scheduled to end around 4:19 a.m. ET (9:19 GMT) on Saturday, when Freedom will dock in the forward port of the station’s Harmony module.
You can watch the rendezvous and docking on Space.com, courtesy of NASA. directly via space agency. Coverage will begin Saturday at 2:30 a.m. ET (7:30 p.m. Japan time).
Related: Live updates from the Ax-3 commercial astronaut mission
Ax-3 is the third manned mission to the ISS, organized by Houston company Axiom Space. It has Axiom’s first all-European crew on board, including mission specialist Alper Gezeravci, the first astronaut of Turkish national origin. He was joined by Ax-3 mission commander and former NASA astronaut Michael “LA” López-Alegría (who holds dual U.S. and Spanish citizenship), and mission pilot and Italian Air Force colonel Walter Villaday. , will be joined by European Space Mission Specialist Marcus Wandt. agency.
The hatch between the ISS and the Freedom capsule is scheduled to open approximately 90 minutes after docking, allowing the Ax-3 quartet to float into the orbiting laboratory.
Onboard, Ax-3’s crew will live and work alongside the station’s current residents and conduct experiments for various research investigations. Much of the science involved in Axiom’s first two crewed missions focused on human spaceflight and microgravity habitability, and this latest mission continues that trend.
Ax-3 research includes robotics experiments using high-strength alloys, with implications for construction and assembly in space. An experiment in Turkey called “Vokalkord” uses artificial intelligence algorithms to diagnose dozens of diseases by analyzing coughs and someone’s speech. Many other studies in physics, biology and microgravity.
The Ax-3 crew will spend up to 14 days in the orbiting laboratory, after which the astronauts and SpaceX capsule will leave the ISS and return to Earth via parachute splashdown off the coast of Florida. is.