A SpaceX Cargo Dragon capsule exploded on Wednesday night west of Tampa, returning more than two tons of International Space Station experimental samples, including live rodents and a dozen bottles of French wine.
The commercial supply ship that flew on a motorboat fell off the track and re-entered the atmosphere over the Gulf of Mexico. A series of parachutes deployed to slow the capsule’s descent to a relatively gentle speed for the space west of Tampa, where a SpaceX repair vehicle was ready to pull the spacecraft out of the sea.
The return completed a 38-day mission for the Cargo Dragon, the first in a new design of SpaceX offering ships serving the International Space Station. The upgraded Cargo Dragon, or Dragon 2, replaces SpaceX’s fleet of first-generation Dragon cargo capsules, which flew for the last time in early 2020.
SpaceX confirmed the successful splashdown of the Cargo Dragon with a tweet. NASA and SpaceX have not provided any direct coverage on the return of the capsule to Earth. A NASA WB-57 aerial image aircraft flew over the recovery zone to capture photos of the Cargo Dragon’s fiery re-entry and splashdown.
NASA released a statement later Wednesday night confirming that the capsule splashed at 20:26 EST (0126 GMT).
The Cargo Dragon pulled out of the space station on Tuesday at 09:05 EST (1405 GMT), one day later than planned. SpaceX and NASA executives delayed homecoming due to bad weather in the primary recovery zone in the Atlantic Ocean northeast of Daytona Beach.
According to a NASA spokesman, the dragon returned to Earth with 4,414 pounds, or 2,002 kilograms of cargo.
The new Cargo Dragon capsules are derived from SpaceX’s humane Crew Dragon spacecraft, which transports astronauts to and from the space station. The upgraded Cargo Dragon capsule, like the Crew Dragon, is designed to splash off the coast of Florida, closer to SpaceX’s Dragon upgrade facility at the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station.
The proximity of Cape Canaveral enables SpaceX to send sensitive cargo back to NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in as little as four to nine hours. Previous dragon cargo missions ended in landslides in the Pacific coast off the coast of Baja California, and it took days before research samples from space stations were transferred to NASA.
The ‘Go Navigator’ recovery ship manned by SpaceX technicians and engineers is expected to hoist the capsule aboard its deck after being splashed. The SpaceX team planned to unload time-critical scientific specimens and place them on a helicopter overnight for a flight to the Kennedy Space Center.
According to NASA, the helicopter will arrive with the truck at Kennedy’s launch and landing facility, and the cargo will be transported by truck to the nearby space station processing facility.
Scientists there will receive the samples to begin their analyzes. After a quick look at the SSPF at Kennedy, some of the material will be sent to research teams in California, Texas, Massachusetts, Japan and elsewhere, NASA said.
The return of scientific specimens to Kennedy so soon after their return to space is back to the spacecraft program when missionary work came directly to the spacecraft in Florida.
“I am excited to finally see science return here again, because we can get these time-sensitive experiments in the lab faster than ever,” Jennifer Wahlberg, project manager of the Kennedy Space Center, said in a statement. “Sending science into space and then receiving it back on the runway was definitely something in the commute days we were really proud of, and it’s great to be back in that process.”
Experiments that came aboard the Cargo Dragon included live mice that were part of the Rodent Research 23 study, which according to NASA looked at the function of arteries, veins and lymph structures in the eye and changes in the retina before and after the study space travel.
Scientists seek insight into whether these changes affect vision. At least 40 percent of astronauts experience visual impairment during long-haul flights, NASA says.
“Rodent Research-23 is designed to begin adapting responses to rodent gravity as quickly as possible, making it an ideal candidate for this flight,” said Jennifer Buchli, deputy chief scientist for the International Space Station program at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, said.
On board the Cargo Dragon: twelve bottles of Bordeaux wine and 320 cuttings of vines.
The wine bottles spent more than a year on the space station after launching on a Northrop Grumman Cygnus supply ship at the end of 2019. Now back on Earth, some of the bottles will be opened for exclusive tastings, while researchers will begin a more scientific analysis. of the wine to determine how it aged after 14 months in gravity.
Scientists will look at the vine branches – called sticks – to determine how they weathered the environment of radiation and low gravity in orbit. One of the aims of the privately funded experiment, led by a Luxembourg company called Space Cargo Unlimited, is to learn how the plants adapt to the stresses of space travel.
Space Cargo Unlimited says that grapes and wine cellars are susceptible to climate change, and the results of the experiment in the space station could lead to lessons on how to grow grapes in more difficult environments on Earth.
There was also a biomedical experiment led by researchers at Stanford University to look at how microgravity affects cardiovascular cells, and an experiment developed by Japanese scientists, which shows the growth of 3D organ buds from human stem cells in space.
Other experiments returned to Earth include a payload led by Texas State University researchers to identify bacterial genes used during biofilm growth. The investigation investigated whether these biofilms could corrode stainless steel and evaluate the effectiveness of a silver-based disinfectant in assisting designers of future long-term vehicles.
Material from a demonstration of fiber optic production technology also came home on the Cargo Dragon. Scientists and engineers will examine the optical fiber material produced in the space station to see if it matches the predictions that fibers produced in space are ‘much better than those produced on Earth’, says NASA.
The upgraded Cargo Dragon spacecraft has more internal volume than SpaceX’s first generation Dragon cargo ship, which in 2020 led its last mission to the space station. It also has the double-powered locked capability of previous Dragon capsules and can hold up to 12 such lockers for return to Earth, adding more capacity to bring back frozen and chilled monsters.
“Using the previous Dragon spacecraft, it could take up to 48 hours for the capsule to hit the waters in the Pacific Ocean before returning to Long Beach, California. We started distributing the samples about four to five hours later, ” said Mary Walsh, the lead pilot of Kennedy’s Office for Research Integration. “Now we will return science earlier and hand it over to researchers, just four to nine hours after the splash.”
“The ability to get science back quickly is so important for space biology because we want to understand whether the effects we want to measure on an orbit are due to the microgravity or the stress that a participant or” can see a monster. during landing, ”said Kirt Costello, a scientist at NASA’s main space station program. “It is therefore a wonderful ability to return those to the Cape really quickly and have them handed over to our scientists.”
Other changes made to the new Cargo Dragon spacecraft include the ability to dock and dock automatically at the station. The first generation Dragon cargo ships were seized by the station’s robotic arm.
According to SpaceX, the Cargo Dragon’s compartment under pressure can be reused five times. The hull without pressure is disposable, and each Cargo Dragon mission will fly a new one.
Before the brake rockets were fired to fall off the track, the Cargo Dragon put its trunk portion into space to stay in space before the atmosphere through the air caused it to re-enter the atmosphere and burn up. The capsule also closed a nose cone to cover the plant port before plunging back into the atmosphere.
The Cargo Dragon launched on top of a Falcon 9 rocket from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida on December 6. The capsule arrived at the space station the next day with an automatic coupling with a new docking port at the apex or on top of the Harmony module of the research post.
It has delivered numerous experiments to the space station and a commercial airlock for Nanoracks, a Houston-based company that plans to use the add-on to deploy small satellites, dispose of debris and provide investigations.
The Cargo Dragon mission was SpaceX’s 21st return flight to the space station since 2012 under a multi-billion dollar contract with NASA.
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