SpaceX’s Dragon cargo spacecraft is scheduled to depart from the International Space Station on Tuesday, carrying nearly 2,000 kilograms of supplies and scientific experiments.
A SpaceX Dragon cargo resupply craft is scheduled to depart from the International Space Station at 3.35 AM IST on Tuesday, January 10. Dragon will be carrying nearly 2,000 kilograms of supplies and scientific experiments that were designed to be conducted in the microgravity environment aboard the space station. This Dragon spacecraft initially docked with the space station on November 27 last year.
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How to stream SpaceX’s Dragon departing from the space station
NASA will provide live coverage as Dragon undocks from the space station and departs it. The live coverage will start at 3.15 AM IST on Tuesday, January 10 and will be available on NASA TV, the agency’s website, and its YouTube channel. You can watch it in the window below.
How Dragon will come back to Earth
At 3.30 AM IST on Tuesday, ground controllers at SpaceX’s facility in Hawthorne, California, will send commands to Dragon to undock from the Harmony module of the International Space Station and fire its thrusters to move a safe distance away from the station.
After this, the space station will reenter Earth’s atmosphere, before it splashes down off the coast of Florida on Wednesday, January 11. Splashing down off the coast of Florida is ideal since it will allow teams to quickly transport the science experiments aboard dragon to NASA’s Space Station Processing Facility at the Kennedy Space Center. The splashdown itself won’t be covered by NASA as part of its live coverage.
What is Dragon carrying?
On its journey back to Earth, the Dragon spacecraft will be carrying a deep space radiation protection vest, hydroponic and aeroponic agriculture systems, and investigations for bioprospecting in space, among other experiments and supplies. Bioprospecting refers to the research process of looking for plants and animals that may contain substances that have potential uses as drugs, biochemicals and more.
The “Astrorad” deep-space radiation protection vest is designed to protect future astronauts from the high doses of radiation caused by unpredicted solar weather events and will be returning to Earth after months of testing on the space station. Crew members wore the vest as they performed daily tasks to provide feedback about it. The vest’s developers will use this feedback to improve it so that it can be used by astronauts going on Artemis missions to the Moon and beyond.
The XROOTS system being carried by Dragon uses hydroponic and aeroponic techniques to grow plants in space without the use of soil. As plants were being grown in space, researchers collected video and still images to evaluate the systems. Now, the plant chambers are being returned to Earth so that the researchers can conduct additional evaluations. These systems could potentially be used to grow crops in space during future long-duration space missions.
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