An Antares rocket will launch to the International Space Station today, and you may watch the motion live.
The nineteenth business resupply service mission from Northrop Grumman (NG-19) will launch a batch of cargo, provisions and science experiments to the International Space Station (ISS) on Tuesday, August 1. That is the ultimate flight for this particular Antares rocket, which is about to get replaced with a more moderen version sometime next 12 months.
The Northrop Grumman Antares rocket launching the cargo ferry is scheduled to liftoff at 8:31 p.m. EDT (0031 GMT, August 2), from NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility on the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport (MARS), in Wallops, Virginia. Antares will carry a Cygnus spacecraft with over 8,200 kilos (3,700 kilograms) of cargo for the present ISS crew. You possibly can watch the launch live here at Space.com courtesy of NASA TV.
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Continuing their tradition of naming Cygnus vehicles for influential individuals in spaceflight, the NG-19 Cygnus was christened the SS Laurel Clark, for the fallen space shuttle Columbia astronaut. Once on orbit, the SS Laurel Clark will spend about 2.5 days catching as much as the ISS, with which it’s scheduled to rendezvous early Friday morning. You possibly can watch that rendezvous live here courtesy of NASA TV, starting around 4:30 a.m. ET (0930 GMT) on Friday (August 4).
Tuesday’s launch marks the last for the present version of Northrop Grumman’s Antares rocket, the Antares 230 series. Supply lines for Antares, which relied on Ukrainian-built first stages and Russian rocket engines, were disrupted in the beginning of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February, 2022.
In response, Northrop Grumman announced an agreement with U.S. company Firefly Aerospace to fabricate engines and a brand new first stage for an upgraded Antares 330 series rocket, which was expected to launch within the latter half of next 12 months. Nevertheless, in a pre-launch press conference July 30, Northrop Grumman director of space launch programs Kurt Eberly indicated the corporate has had reassess that timeline.
Eberly says the brand new Antares, “goes to feature a brand new first stage and the prevailing upper stack that’ll get us back flying within the Summer 2025.” He later added that Northrop Grumman was, “hoping for the tip of ’24.” Now, Antares 330’s first launch can be NG-23, in the summertime of 2025.
Aboard, the SS Laurel Clark will carry greater than 20 research investigations, equipment and foodstuffs to replenish supplies for the space station’s current and upcoming crews. The ISS National Laboratory, which manages public research on the space station, has sponsored greater than 20 experiments flying on NG-19.
Research headed to the ISS includes several material science and technology demonstrations to check Earth-monitoring sensors, space antenna upgrades and material science investigations, in addition to nearly half a dozen human health-focused biological investigations. These will study therapies for cardiovascular regenerative techniques, neurological and genetic disorders and degenerative retinal diseases. A full list of highlights is accessible on the ISS National Lab website.
NASA published its own list of notable research aboard NG-19, which incorporates the sixth and final flammability experiment from NASA’s Glenn Research Center. Saffire-VI is part of a series of demonstrations with the goal of understanding how fire behaves in space. The automated experiment won’t happen until near the tip of the NG-19 mission, after the Cygnus spacecraft has undocked from the ISS and entered an independent orbit. There, Saffire-VI will initiate a sequence of burns at differing oxygen levels, which scientists will observe remotely.
“This work has already modified our understanding of fabric flammability in low gravity and demonstrated that just as on Earth, smoke from a fireplace represents probably the most immediate hazard to the crew,” Saffire principal investigator David Urban said in a NASA release.
A brand new planetary statement probe is headed to the ISS known as the Multi Needle Langmuir Probe (m-NLP). This sensor, from the European Space Agency (ESA), can be attached to the outside of the station, on the Columbus module’s Bartolomeo Platform. The m-NLP features six pointy, protruding probe antenna used to scan plasma densities in Earth’s ionosphere, which have deleterious affects on GPS and other satellite-based navigation systems.
One other piece of hardware aboard the SS Laurel Clark is a brand new potable water dispenser (PWD). Dubbed Exploration PWD, the station’s recent drinking fountain is replacing one which launched in 2008. Exploration PWD could be operated remotely, and incorporates a host of other upgrades in comparison with its predecessor. It has the flexibility to self-monitor the status of its various systems, uses “advanced water sanitization and microbial growth reduction methods,” in accordance with the NASA statement, and is able to meting out hot water.
The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) as has cargo flying as a part of the NG-19 mission. As a part of an academic outreach program, JAXA has included a hard disk containing digital artwork from over 13,000 students across 74 schools. The same mission, the STORIES of Space Project (Story SD Card Testing and On-Board Research on the International Space Station Experiment and Survey), will deliver greater than 300 written stories stored on SD-cards, with the goal of engaging space enthusiasts with space exploration. STORIES can even measure the consequences of memory degradation on account of the consequences of radiation on those SD-cards.
In a statement, STORIES of Space Project creator Beth Mund said, “the STORIES of Space project engages a growing community of space exploration ambassadors – individuals who may never train to be an astronaut or travel to space, but space enthusiasts who wish to be an element of the invention and advancements in space.”
NASA coverage for Cygnus’ rendezvous with the ISS will begin at 4:30 a.m. EDT (0830 GMT), Friday, August 4. Using the space station’s robot arm, NASA astronaut Woody Hoburg will capture Cygnus for berthing on the Unity module’s nadir (Earth-facing) port, around 7:30 a.m. EDT (1130 GMT). Cygnus will remain on the station until October, after which it would be loaded with station refuse and released for repositioning right into a decaying orbit, where it would eventually burn up in Earth’s atmosphere.
With the Antares 300 series not yet operational, Northrop Grumman has contracted SpaceX to fly the subsequent few Cygnus cargo spacecraft aboard a Falcon 9 rocket. Grumman’s twentieth resupply mission, NG-20, is slated for sometime this November.