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A Northrop Grumman Antares rocket and a Cygnus cargo ship came into orbit Saturday from Wallops Island, Virginia, in search of the International Space Station with over 7,200 pounds of search and supply equipment, the second refueling ship to be launched at the space station in less than 24 hours.
The unmanned commercial cargo ship piloted the 42-meter (42-m) Antares rocket, far from Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport, a state-owned facility on the Atlantic coast of Wallops Island.
The first stage of the Antares rocket, with fuel tanks built in Ukraine and Russian-made RD-181 engines, propelled the launcher into clear skies until dawn with a push of 864,000 pounds. The Antares guidance computer instructed the engines to pivot smoothly, steering the rocket southeastward over the Atlantic Ocean to align with the trajectory of the space station.
Three and a half minutes after the start of the flight, the first stage was shut down and separated, leaving the Antares upper stage, powered by a US-built solid-fuel Beaver 30XL rocket engine, to complete the tanker's acceleration work. Cygnus. in orbit.
About nine minutes after takeoff, the Cygnus Space Shuttle separated from Antares' upper deck and arrived in a preliminary orbit to begin a two-day pursuit of the space station, culminating in its capture by the laboratory robotic arm at 5:20 am EST. (10:20 GMT) Monday.
"Not only has the launch been great this morning, but Cygnus has been placed exactly where we wanted it," said Frank DeMauro, vice president of advanced programs at Northrop Grumman Innovation Systems, who developed and owns the rocket Antares and Cygnus. "After the separation of the spaceship, we were able to communicate (with him) extremely quickly and begin to condition ourselves. We initialized the guidance system and the propulsion system. All this went very well.
"Then we started the process of deploying the solar panels, and I'm happy to say that they have been deployed successfully and are generating a lot of energy, so the satellite is very healthy and ready to start. journey to the ISS ", DeMauro told reporters after the launch.
The Cygnus spacecraft has joined a Russian refueling cargo ship in orbit after its launch Friday by Kazakhstan. Progress's cargo capsule is scheduled to arrive at the space station with a mooring around 14.30. EST (19H30 GMT) Sunday, followed by the capture of Cygnus with the robotic arm of the station Monday at 5:20 am EST (10:20 GMT).
The launch of Antares in Virginia has been delayed for two days due to rainy weather.
"While we were waiting for the weather in Wallops, we had a great launch of Progress in Baikonur, Kazakhstan, on Friday," said Joel Montalbano, NASA Space Station Program Manager. "We look forward to having both vehicles attached to the International Space Station, and that the crew will be handling the science, research, all the equipment we have purchased for these vehicles and the continuation of the fantastic work. we are doing on the International Space Station. "
NASA astronaut Serena Auñón-Chancellor will be at the helm of the Canadian-built robotic arm to hang the Cygnus freighter Monday. The commander of the European Space Agency, Alexander Gerst, and the Russian cosmonaut Sergey Prokopyev join him at the outpost in orbit 400 km above the Earth.
Two other members of the team were to be on the station, but their launch was halted two minutes after takeoff on 11 October, aboard a Soyuz rocket from Kazakhstan. Soyuz commander Alexey Ovchinin and NASA astronaut Nick Hague landed safely after the disaster.
The accident left the station with a crew of three for weeks longer than planned, until three new crew members left on another Soyuz flight. On December 3, Gerst and his company will leave the station in their landing craft Soyuz newly arrived residents in orbit until another Soyuz crew arrives in the spring.
Montalbano stated that some research activities had been redefined, but that their activities had not been significantly affected.
"As far as science is concerned, with two fewer people … you will do a little less onboard activities, but it is only for a short time, and in fact, the members of The crew on board took it up, and they really worked hard and picked up what needed to be done, "he said." Any science or research that's time-consuming, is underway, and we redefine the priorities of the other activities, so from this point of view, we are doing really well. "
Supply ship Cygnus – participating in the NG-10 cargo mission – is expected to deliver to the space station 7,200 pounds (3,273 kg), including a plastic recycler and a 3D printer designed to improve manufacturing capabilities in the area. 39, space, and an experiment that studies how the human body's ability to perceive movement, orientation, and distance changes into microgravity.
The rebreather and printer, called the Refabricator, is a technical demonstration aimed at analyzing how future space missions could build tools and spare parts on board, without the need for replenishment of the Earth. It was developed by Tethers Unlimited under contract with NASA.
"At Tethers, we have developed, designed and tested the refabricator," said Allison Porter, air mission manager at the Seattle-based company. "Basically, we are melting polymers and transforming them into a 3D printer filament … Once the recycler has recycled and produced a new filament, we are able to print new parts."
The space station already has an integrated 3D printer provided by a company named Made in Space. But this device, designed as a proof of concept for 3D printing in space, needs new material from the Earth to be introduced.
"When all the results were known, we found that there was no significant microgravity effect in engineering," said Diane Risdon, head of the Space Manufacturing Re-Manufacturing Project at Marshall Space Flight Center. NASA in Alabama. "We now have our 3D printer, we know that it works in the space. The next thing is where do we get the filament? … do we have to download this? We try to avoid downloading large masses, so we must find a durable source of filament.
"On the ISS, we know that there are a multitude of plastic bags," she continued. "The crew complains, what are we doing with all these bags? They also have packaging – plastic packaging – they use plastic food containers, plastic medical devices, so they periodically collect all this garbage and burn it in space.
"We think, well, there is our resource," Risdon said. "If we can recycle them, we are on the right track to get our filament."
Another scientific investigation aboard the space shuttle Cygnus will focus on the processes at the origin of the solar system that led to the formation of dust particles that eventually developed to form larger objects, leading to birth planets. The experiment, conducted by researchers from Goethe University in Frankfurt, Germany, "zaps a specially formulated dust with an electric current, then studies the shape and texture of the pellets formed from these stages at the same time. lack of gravity, "according to a NASA survey: the survey.
Here is the detail of the cargo manifest provided by NASA:
- 2,515.5 pounds (1,141 kilograms) of crew supply
- 2,301.6 pounds (1,044 kilograms) of scientific investigations
- 2,076.8 pounds (942 kg) of vehicle hardware
- 253.5 pounds (115 kilograms) of computing resources
- 68.3 pounds (31 kilograms) of output equipment in the space
The tanker Cygnus is expected to remain docked in the Unity module of the International Space Station until mid-February, when it will be released by the robotic arm of the station.
The automated freight carrier, loaded with waste after it leaves the station, will fire with its engine to climb into a higher orbit about 300 miles (500 kilometers) above the Earth to deploy two CubeSats.
MYSat 1 is a nanosatellite, a 1U CubeSat the size of a Rubik's cube. Carrying two payloads – a camera and a lithium ion cell battery – MYSat 1 was built by the Masdar Institute of Science and Technology in Abu Dhabi with the support of Northrop Grumman Innovation Systems and the company Al Yah Satellite Communications, United Arab Emirates.
The other CubeSat to be released in the upper orbit is CHEFSat 2 of the US Naval Research Laboratory.
CHEFSat 2, which is about the size of a shoebox, is a copy of a CubeSat launched on a Cygnus cargo mission to the space station last November. CHEFSat 2 will test ready-to-use technologies to assess their performance in space, focusing on new radio communication capabilities.
Cygnus will lower its orbit below the altitude of the space station after having published MYSat 1 and CHEFSat 2, aiming for an altitude of about 325 km for the separation of KickSat 2, a CubeSat mission sponsored by NASA and led by lead researcher Zac Manchester at Stanford University. .
KickSat 2 contains 100 tiny "sprites" – essentially 1.4 inch (3.5 cm) square-inch circuit boards with built-in power, computing, sensing and communication equipment. This mission follows the KickSat mission launched in 2014, but has failed to release its sprites into orbit.
The mission will test the limits of satellite miniaturization, a trend of affordability widely popularized by CubeSat's design over the last two decades. But KickSat sprites are only a fraction of the size of a CubeSat.
KickSat 2 will eject its sprites at a lower altitude to ensure that the circuit maps take up Earth's atmosphere in just a few weeks, thus avoiding the possibility that sprites, which might be difficult to track with ground-based radars , become a long-term strategy. threat of space debris on other satellites.
The Cygnus was to carry more than half a dozen additional CubeSats in its internal cabin for possible release into an airlock of the space station. But all were removed from the cargo manifest and postponed to subsequent launches, according to Scott Higginbotham, Mission Manager for NASA's Nanosatellite Education Launch Program at the Kennedy Space Center.
Two of the CubeSats initially reserved for Purdue University's NG-10 mission – named UNITE and TechEdSat 8 and NASA's Ames Research Center – will launch the next SpaceX replenishment flight to the station no earlier than December 4, announced Higginbotham. The rest will be placed in future Northrop Grumman or SpaceX cargo launches.
The officials also decided not to launch a secondary payload on the second floor of the Antares rocket.
About 60 "ThinSat" wafers, each about the size of a slice of bread, were to be deployed from the Antares rocket soon after they arrived in orbit, well below the altitude of the space station, where they would quickly return to the atmosphere and be consumed. . From a standard form factor, college to university students integrated sensor and transmitter hardware into the ThinSats with the help of the Virginia Commercial Space Flight Authority, Twiggs Space Lab, Northrop Grumman and NASA's Wallops Flight Base.
The first ThinSats were supposed to fly at the launch of the NG-10, but they will be flying on the next Antares mission in April.
Officials agreed to remove the ThinSats from Saturday's launch to ensure that the tiny pads do not pose a risk of collision with the Progress tanker ship, said Dale Nash, CEO of Virginia Space. Although there is no need to worry that the ThinSats could pose a threat to the space station itself, the Progress revolved around the same altitude where the tiny fleas were to be released.
The supply ship Cygnus launched on Saturday bears the name of SS John Young, in honor of NASA astronaut who has carried out six space missions: Gemini 3, Gemini 10, Apollo 10, Apollo 16, STS -1 and STS-9. Young was co-pilot of the NASA Gemini spacecraft's first flight in 1965, walked on the moon at the Apollo 16 in 1972, and commanded the first space shuttle mission in 1981. He died in January.
The unmanned Cygnus freight carrier consists of two modules: a service and propulsion module built by Northrop Grumman Innovation Systems in Dulles, Virginia, and a pressurized logistics module built by Thales Alenia Space in Turin, Italy.
The NG-10 is the first Cygnus flight since Orbital ATK's acquisition of Northrop Grumman, who developed and executed the previous cargo missions under a 11-contract NASA contract with a value of 2, 89 billion dollars.
Starting at NG-12, scheduled for launch in late 2019, Northrop Grumman will be launching a commercial replenishment service tracking contract, securing the company a minimum of six additional flights by 2024.
SpaceX also launches cargoes to the space station for NASA, and the space agency has asked Sierra Nevada Corp. to begin replenishing the research complex at the end of 2020.
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