SpaceX’s CRS-26 Cargo Dragon is on its approach house from the Worldwide Area Station (ISS), following a clean autonomous undocking from the space-facing (or “zenith”) port of the Concord node at 5:05 p.m. EDT Monday, 9 January. The cargo ship—launched last 26 November with 7,777 kilos (3,528 kilograms) of pressurized and unpressurized payloads, tools and provides for the incumbent Expedition 68 crew—spent greater than six weeks docked on the area station, longer than any earlier Cargo Dragon, and returns to Earth with roughly 4,400 kilos (2,000 kilograms) of {hardware} and science outcomes.
Assuming all goes nicely, the mission will conclude with a parachute-assisted splashdown off the Florida Coast on Wednesday, 11 January, after which its multitude of payloads will likely be shortly transferred to the Area Station Processing Facility (SSPF) at NASA’s Kennedy Area Heart (KSC). That can finish CRS-26 after greater than 45 days in orbit, practically a full week longer than the 39 days, 11 hours and three minutes logged by SpaceX’s current Cargo Dragon record-holder, CRS-9, when it returned to Earth in August 2016.
CRS-26 additionally marks the preliminary outing of the brand new C211 Cargo Dragon automobile, which rose to orbit from KSC’s historic Pad 39A by way of a brand-new Falcon 9 booster at 2:20 p.m. EST final 26 November. And by the way, that very booster—tailnumbered B1076—is at the moment poised on Space Launch Complex (SLC)-40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Fla., awaiting a scheduled 11:50 p.m. EST Monday liftoff to ship 40 broadband web satellites into low-Earth orbit for London, England-headquartered OneWeb.
After a clean ascent on the afternoon of 26 November, the Cargo Dragon separated from the second stage of its Falcon 9 and commenced a 17-hour orbital chase to achieve the ISS. Monitored by Expedition 68 astronauts Nicole Mann and Josh Cassada from the station’s multi-windowed cupola, CRS-26 docked completely on the Concord node’s zenith port at 7:39 a.m. EST on the twenty seventh, excessive above the Pacific Ocean.
Thus started the longest single Cargo Dragon mission ever flown so far to the sprawling orbital complicated. This longevity was dictated partially by the wants of its haul of scientific experiments and partially by the character of certainly one of CRS-26’s principal payloads: the second of three pairs of Boeing-built ISS Roll-Out Photo voltaic Arrays (iROSAs), scheduled for set up onto six of the station’s eight legacy Photo voltaic Array Wings (SAWs) to “shadow” and increase their power-generating potential.
As previously reported by AmericaSpace, iROSAs will assist future ISS growth and customers’ burgeoning payload needs by rising the general electrical energy output from round 160 kilowatts to as a lot as 215 kilowatts. The primary pair of iROSAs were installed in June 2021 by Expedition 65 spacewalkers Shane Kimbrough and Thomas Pesquet, with CRS-26’s pair of arrays had been earmarked to outfit Energy Channel 3A on the station’s starboard-side S-4 truss and Energy Channel 4A on the port-side P-4 truss throughout two periods of Extravehicular Exercise (EVA) by Cassada and crewmate Frank Rubio.
Two hours after CRS-26’s docking, Cassada opened Concord’s zenith hatch and entered the Cargo Dragon, adopted in brief order by Rubio, Mann and Japan’s Koichi Wakata. Over the following a number of days, the astronauts labored to switch crucial life science samples over to the U.S. Future lab, while robotics controllers on the bottom used the 57.7-foot-long (17.6-meter) Canadarm2 robotic arm to extract the iROSA pallet from the Cargo Dragon’s unpressurized trunk and set up it onto the station’s truss for ease of entry by Cassada and Rubio on their spacewalks.
These spacewalks, executed on 3 and 22 December, totaled 14 hours and 13 minutes, and noticed the astronauts efficiently set up each units of iROSAs. However the extremely seen drama of the iROSA work was additionally accompanied by a full plate of analysis aboard CRS-26. Its vary of payloads spanned the fields of life sciences to expertise and in-space building to tomato cultivation in assist of future long-duration missions into deep area.
Notably, the Veg-05 research expanded the crop number of the station’s on-board Veggie facility from a earlier emphasis upon leafy greens to Pink Robin dwarf tomato crops, to be grown over a number of months, with three “harvests”. This new part of ongoing Veggie work focuses upon the impression of sunshine high quality and fertilizer on manufacturing, microbial meals security, dietary worth and style acceptability.
In mid-December, Cassada and Mann started work tending the tomato crops, frequently watering them and photographing their progress. And after Christmas, the crew labored on BioNutrients-2, a part of an ongoing sequence of experiments to grasp and supply enough diet to future area explorers, utilizing yogurt, a fermented milk product, often called “kefir”, and a yeast-based beverage.
Earlier this month, Mann nourished and incubated these yeast specimens within the station’s Area Automated Bioproduct Laboratory (SABL).
Different CRS-26 payloads included the Moon Microscope to check a equipment for in-flight medical diagnoses, utilizing a hand-held 60x-100x miniature digital microscope whose imagery might be transmitted on to floor specialists. It might present a diagnostic device for crew members in area or on the surfaces of the Moon or Mars and will assist different duties, comparable to testing water, foodstuffs and surfaces for contamination and imaging lunar specimens.
And the Extrusion research seeks to show the extrusion of photocurable liquid resins into custom-made types beneath microgravity situations, to create new structural geometries not attainable on Earth. It could lay the groundwork for additive manufacturing (or “3D-printing”) of extra difficult area buildings with particularly tailor-made properties.
Elsewhere, preparations had been underway for CRS-26’s return to Earth. Final week, Rubio analyzed microbial specimens gathered from the ISS environment and surfaces, and subsequently grown in an incubator. These had been among the many multitude of scientific samples returning to Earth aboard the Cargo Dragon.
Shortly after New 12 months, Mann and Rubio started loading return {hardware} aboard the cargo ship, a course of which accelerated final weekend to incorporate the efforts of all 4 U.S. Operational Section (USOS) crew members. At 5:05 p.m. EST Monday, because the station flew 259 miles (416 kilometers) over the Pacific Ocean, the Cargo Dragon undocked from Concord’s zenith port to start its return to Earth, focusing on a parachute-assisted splashdown off the Florida Coast on Wednesday.
