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A SpaceX Cargo Dragon capsule parachuted to a landing on the target Wednesday night west of Tampa, returning more than two tons of experimental samples from the International Space Station, including live rodents and a dozen bottles of French wine. aged in space.
The commercial supply craft, flying on autopilot, left orbit and reentered the atmosphere over the Gulf of Mexico Wednesday night. A sequence of parachutes deployed to slow the descent of the capsule to a relatively smooth speed for the landing west of Tampa, where a SpaceX recovery craft was waiting to lift the spacecraft out of the sea.
The return concluded a 38-day mission for the Cargo Dragon, the first of a newly designed SpaceX supply craft to service the International Space Station. The enhanced Cargo Dragon, or Dragon 2, replaces SpaceX’s fleet of first-generation Dragon cargo pods, which last flew in early 2020.
SpaceX confirmed the successful landing of the Cargo Dragon with a tweet. NASA and SpaceX did not provide any live coverage of the capsule’s return to Earth. A NASA WB-57 airborne imaging plane flew over the recovery zone to capture images of the fiery re-entry and splashdown of the Cargo Dragon.
NASA issued a statement later Wednesday night confirming that the capsule spilled at 8:26 p.m. EST (0126 GMT).
Cargo Dragon undocked from the space station at 9:05 am EST (1405 GMT) on Tuesday, a day later than planned. Managers at SpaceX and NASA delayed the return home due to bad weather in the primary recovery zone in the Atlantic Ocean northeast of Daytona Beach.
The Dragon returned to Earth with 4,414 pounds, or 2,002 kilograms, of cargo, according to a NASA spokesperson.
The new Cargo Dragon capsules are derived from SpaceX’s Crew Dragon spacecraft, which transports astronauts to and from the space station. The upgraded Cargo Dragon capsule, like the Crew Dragon, is designed to land off the coast of Florida, closer to SpaceX’s Dragon refit facility at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station.
The closer proximity to Cape Canaveral allows SpaceX to return urgent cargo to NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in just four to nine hours. Previous Dragon cargo missions ended with a splashdown in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Baja California, and it took days for research samples from the space station to be transferred to NASA.
The “Go Navigator” recovery ship, manned by SpaceX technicians and engineers, was expected to hoist the capsule aboard its deck after landing. The SpaceX team planned to unload time-critical scientific specimens and put them on a helicopter for an overnight flight to Kennedy Space Center.
The helicopter will arrive at the Kennedy Launch and Landing Facility, and the cargo will be transported to the nearby Space Station Processing Facility by truck, according to NASA.
The scientists will receive the specimens to begin their analyzes. After a quick look inside the SSPF at Kennedy, some of the materials will be sent to research teams in California, Texas, Massachusetts, Japan and elsewhere, NASA said.
The return of scientific specimens to Kennedy so quickly after their return to space dates back to the space shuttle program, when missions brought cargo directly to the Florida spaceport.
“I’m excited to finally see science come back here again because we can get these urgent experiments to the lab faster than ever,” Jennifer Wahlberg, utilization project manager at Kennedy Space Center, said in a statement. “Sending science out into space and then getting it back on track was definitely something in the shuttle days that we really prided ourselves on, and to be able to rejoin that process is great.”
The experiments that came home aboard the Cargo Dragon included live mice that are part of the Rodent Research 23, which studies the function of arteries, veins and lymphatic structures in the eye and changes in the retina before and after the flight. space, according to NASA.
Scientists are looking for information on whether these changes affect sight. At least 40 percent of astronauts experience vision problems on long-duration space flights, NASA says.
“Rodent Research-23 was designed to begin studying rodents’ gravity retraining responses as quickly as possible, making it an ideal candidate for this flight,” said Jennifer Buchli, Deputy Program Scientist for the Station. International Space at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston.
Also on board the Cargo Dragon: Twelve bottles of Bordeaux wine and 320 grapevine cuttings.
The wine bottles spent more than a year on the space station after being launched on a Northrop Grumman Cygnus supply ship in late 2019. Now, back on Earth, some of the bottles will be opened for an exclusive tasting, while that the researchers will begin a more scientific analysis. part of the wine to measure how it aged after 14 months in microgravity.
Scientists will look at the branches of the vine, called rods, to assess how they withstood radiation and the low-gravity environment in orbit. One goal of the privately funded experiment, led by a Luxembourg startup called Space Cargo Unlimited, is to learn how plants adapted to the stresses of space flight.
Space Cargo Unlimited says that grapes and wineries are susceptible to climate change, and the results of the space station experiment could lead to lessons on how to grow grapes in harsher environments on Earth.
There was also a biomedical experiment led by researchers at Stanford University that looked at how microgravity affects cardiovascular cells, and an experiment developed by Japanese scientists demonstrating the growth of organ buds in 3D from human stem cells in space. .
Other experiments returned to Earth included a payload led by researchers at Texas State University seeking to identify bacterial genes used during biofilm growth. The research examined whether these biofilms can corrode stainless steel and assesses the effectiveness of a silver-based disinfectant in helping designers of future long-life space vehicles.
Materials from a fiber optic production technology demonstration also made it home on the Cargo Dragon. Scientists and engineers will examine fiber optic materials made on the space station to see if they match predictions that fibers produced in space have “qualities far superior to those produced on Earth,” says NASA.
The upgraded Cargo Dragon spacecraft has more internal volume than SpaceX’s first-generation Dragon cargo ship, which made its last mission to the space station in 2020.It also has twice the locked capacity of previous Dragon capsules, and can support up to 12 capsules of this type. lockers to return to Earth, adding more capacity to bring frozen and refrigerated samples.
“Using the previous Dragon spacecraft, it could take up to 48 hours from the time the capsule hits the water in the Pacific Ocean for it to return to Long Beach, California. Then we started distributing those samples four to five hours after that, ”said Mary Walsh, utilization flight leader for Kennedy’s Office of Research Integration. “Now we are going to have the early return science in hand and deliver it to the researchers four to nine hours after landing.”
“That ability to recover science quickly is so important for space biology because we want to understand whether the effects we are trying to measure in orbit are due to the microgravity condition or the stress that a participant or a sample can see when landing,” said Kirt Costello, chief scientist for NASA’s space station program. “So, having them returned to the Cape really fast and handed over to our scientists is a great new capability.”
Other changes introduced with the new Cargo Dragon spacecraft include the ability to automatically dock and undock at the station. The first-generation Dragon cargo freighters were gripped by the station’s robotic arm.
The Cargo Dragon’s pressurized compartment can be reused five times, according to SpaceX. The non-pressurized trunk is disposable and a new one will fly on every Cargo Dragon mission.
Before firing its braking rockets to fall out of orbit, the Cargo Dragon discarded its trunk section to remain in space before atmospheric drag causes it to naturally re-enter the atmosphere and burn. The capsule also closed a nose cone to cover its docking port before plunging back into the atmosphere.
The Cargo Dragon was launched on December 6 from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida on a Falcon 9 rocket. The capsule arrived at the space station the next day with an automatic link to a new docking port at Zenith, or on the upper side, the Harmony module of the research station.
It delivered numerous experiments and a commercial airlock to the space station for Nanoracks, a Houston-based company that plans to use the addition to deploy small satellites, remove junk and conduct research research.
The Cargo Dragon mission was SpaceX’s 21st refueling flight to the space station since 2012 under a multi-million dollar contract with NASA.
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Follow Stephen Clark on Twitter: @ EstebanClark1.
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