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Lighting up the night sky, a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket streaked into orbit in spectacular fashion Thursday, kicking off a 32-hour rendezvous with the International Space Station to deliver 6,500 kilos of research gear, crew supplies and needed equipment.
Also on board: fresh fruit, cheese and pizza kits and “some fun holiday treats for the crew, like chocolate, pumpkin spice cappuccino, rice cakes, turkey, duck, quail, seafood, cranberry sauce and mochi,” said Dana Weigel, deputy space station program manager on the Johnson Space Center.
Liftoff from historic pad 39 on the Kennedy Space Center got here at 8:28 p.m. EDT, roughly the moment Earth’s rotation carried the pad directly into the plane of the space station’s orbit. That’s a requirement for rendezvous missions with targets moving at greater than 17,000 mph.
The climb to space went easily, and the Dragon was released to fly by itself about 12 minutes after liftoff. If all goes well, the spacecraft will meet up with the space station Saturday morning and stand by for capture by the lab’s robot arm.
The launching marked SpaceX’s twenty ninth Cargo Dragon flight to the space station and the second mission for capsule C-211. The primary stage booster, also making its second flight, flew itself back to the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station to chalk up SpaceX’s thirty ninth Florida touchdown and its 243rd overall.
But the first goal of the flight is to deliver research gear and equipment to the space station.
Among the many equipment being delivered to the station is an experimental high-speed laser communications package designed to send and receive data encoded in infrared laser beams at much higher rates than possible with traditional radio systems.
“That is using optical communication to make use of lower power and smaller hardware for sending data packages back from the space station to Earth which are even larger and faster than our capabilities today,” said Meghan Everett, a senior scientist with the space station program.
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“This optical communication could hugely profit the research that we’re already doing on the space station by allowing our scientists to see the information faster, turn results around faster and even help our medical community by sending down medical packets of knowledge.”
The equipment might be tested for six months as a “technology demonstration.” If it really works as expected, it could be used as an operational communications link.
One other externally mounted instrument being delivered aboard the Dragon is the Atmospheric Waves Experiment, or AWE. It would capture 68,000 infrared images per day to review gravity waves on the boundary between the discernible atmosphere and space — waves powered by the up-and-down interplay between gravity and buoyancy.
Because the waves interact with the ionosphere, “they affect communications, navigation and tracking systems,” said Jeff Forbes, deputy principal investigator on the University of Colorado.
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“AWE will make a very important, first pioneering step to measure the waves entering space from the atmosphere. And we hope to find a way to link these observations with the weather at higher altitudes within the ionosphere.”
And an experiment carried out contained in the station will use 40 rodents to “higher understand the combined effects of spaceflight, nutrition and environmental stressors on (female) reproductive health and bone health,” Everett said.
“There was some previous research that suggested there have been changes in hormone receptors and endocrine function that negatively impacted female reproductive health,” she said. “So we’re hoping the outcomes of this study might be used to tell female astronaut health during long-duration spaceflight and even female reproductive health here on Earth.”