SpaceX’s subsequent cargo launch to the International Space Station (ISS) has been pushed again a day, to Tuesday (Nov. 22).
The delay, which SpaceX introduced on Friday (Nov. 18), was brought on by a coolant leak within the firm’s Dragon cargo capsule. The leak has been mounted and Dragon is now set to raise off atop a Falcon 9 rocket from Florida’s Kennedy Space Center on Tuesday at 3:54 p.m. EST (2054 GMT).
You can watch the liftoff right here at Space.com when the time comes.
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If all goes in keeping with plan, Dragon will arrive on the International Space Station simply earlier than 6 a.m. EST (1100 GMT) on Wednesday (Nov. 23).
It will ship about 7,700 kilos (3,500 kilograms) of provides and scientific experiments to the orbiting lab, together with tasks designed by college students and sponsored by the ISS National Laboratory’s academic outreach packages created to spur curiosity in space sciences.
“Looking forward to this mission,” Joel Montalbano, supervisor of NASA’s International Space Station program, stated throughout a briefing on Friday.
Via the Student Spaceflight Experiments Program, center college and highschool college students competed for the prospect to ship their tasks to the ISS, which embrace fascinating experiments concerned with crystal progress, plant biology, physics and microbial analysis.
Also alongside for the trip shall be payloads originating from the Girl Scouts of America and Space Kids Global that may examine brine shrimp, ants and mobile plant progress in low Earth orbit.
These scholar payloads will be a part of a mess of experiments designed by corporations, universities and analysis institutes, a few of which is able to use the space setting to attempt to make biomedical advances.
One mission will take a look at a brand new bone adhesive that might assist restore fractures, for instance, whereas one other will give a brand new implantable drug-delivery machine an off-Earth trial.
The {hardware} Dragon will haul up on CRS-26 consists of one other set of International Space Station Roll Out Solar Arrays (iROSAs), which shall be put in on the orbiting lab to reinforce its energy system.
“Of critical importance to us is the two new solar arrays that we’ll be doing spacewalks on at the end of November and early December to install and deploy aboard the International Space Station,” Montalbano stated. “In addition to the two solar arrays we’ll be delivering on SpaceX 26, we have some life support equipment, some GPS hardware, some exercise hardware and some medical equipment.”
Dragon will keep docked to the ISS for about 45 days on CRS-26 — 15 days longer than a typical SpaceX cargo flight, he added.
The longer keep was carried out “in order to have time to do the EVAs for the solar array install and keep our science requirements that are critical to the International Space Station,” Montalbano stated.
Since subsequent Thursday is Thanksgiving, an appetizing array of particular vacation meals may even be onboard the resupply mission, together with ice cream, spicy inexperienced beans, stuffing, sweet corn and different conventional Turkey Day favorites.
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