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After a two-day pursuit since the launch of the East Coast of Virginia, a Cygnus cargo ship arrived Monday at the International Space Station with more than 7,200 pounds of supplies and experiments, the second cargo ship to reach the complex. orbit in 15 hours.
A Russian refueling and refueling ship docked at the space station at 1428. EST (1928 GMT) with nearly three tonnes of propellant, water and supplies for the three crew members of the laboratory.
Exactly 15 hours later, at 0528 EST (1028 GMT), the station's robotic arm captured the Northrop Grumman Cygnus probe as it flew in the catching position about 10 meters below the outpost.
NASA flight engineer Serena Auñón-Chancellor was at the helm of the 17-meter-long robotic arm built by Canada to capture the Cygnus tanker on Monday. She entrusted the control of the ground controllers to maneuver the boat to a docking position on the Station's Unity module, where a series of locks and 16 locks were closed to connect firmly. the vehicle at the outpost at 7:31 am EST (12:30 pm). GMT).
The Cygnus Space Shuttle, christened SS John Young in honor of former Gemini, Apollo and Space Shuttle astronauts who died in January, is expected to remain at the station until the mid February. During the nearly three-month stay, the astronauts will unpack supplies and experiments stored in the ship's pressurized compartment, built by Thales Alenia Space in Italy, to replace the objects with garbage.
Space Station Commander Alexander Gerst tweeted photos of the arrival of the Cygnus probe.
Busy time for # Exp57. We just took the second cargo vehicle in a day, the first time in @Space station l & # 39; history. @AstroSerena operated the #Canadarm while I was sending navigation commands to #Cygnus vehicle, excellent team work. Welcome aboard "S.S. John Young "! #Horizons pic.twitter.com/GlMz0Ghc6D
– Alexander Gerst (@Astro_Alex) November 19, 2018
Consecutive arrivals Sunday and Monday set a record for the shortest time between the arrival of a freighter at the space station.
The payloads aboard Cygnus include a plastic recycler and a 3D printer built to enhance manufacturing capabilities in space, as well as an experiment to investigate the human body's ability to perceive movement, orientation and distances in 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
Loaded with garbage after leaving the station, Cygnus will launch its engine to climb into a higher orbit about 300 miles (500 kilometers) above 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 others will be placed in future Northrop Grumman or SpaceX cargo launches.
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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Follow Stephen Clark on Twitter: @ StephenClark1.
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