Antares launches from Wallops without hitch
After two days of weather delays, an Antares rocket blasted off from Virginia’s spaceport at NASA Wallops Flight Facility at 4:01 a.m. Saturday to bullet toward low-Earth orbit.
The booster roared off seamlessly from a pad swathed in pre-dawn darkness carrying an unmanned Cygnus cargo spacecraft on a resupply run to the International Space Station.
“The Cygnus is lighting up the night sky,” a flight controller announced in a NASA TV livestream of the event.
Nine minutes later, with flight controllers carefully monitoring every aspect of the flight, the Cygnus successfully separated from the rocket’s second-stage to the applause and handshakes of engineers and others below at Wallops mission control.
“And hope they get a smooth trip the rest of the way to the ISS,” the NASA flight controller said. “Good calls from Dulles on the ascent. The vehicle’s in their hands now.”
It’s the 10th commercial mission for the Antares and Cygnus under a NASA contract with Dulles-based rocket-maker Orbital ATK, which was acquired by Northrop Grumman earlier this year.
It will take Cygnus two days to rendezvous with the ISS, where the crew will use a robotic arm to grapple it into berthing position and begin unpacking about 7,400 pounds of food, supplies and science experiments.
The ISS provides a unique microgravity platform to enhance science by enabling researchers to look through what they call “a new lens.”
“It enables discoveries and insights that are not possible on Earth,” said Liz Warren, associate program scientist for the ISS’s National Lab, in unveiling the suite of experiments last week.
Research aboard this particular mission include:
Shooting an electrical current through specially formulated “stardust” to observe how it coalesces for clues into how primordial stardust came to form much of the universe;
Growing abnormally large crystals of a protein known as LRRK2, implicated in the development of Parkinson’s disease, to better study the illness in hopes of developing treatments or a cure;
Drafting astronauts into a virtual reality study of how microgravity alters sensory input, and how astronauts can adapt for long- duration space missions;
Using a new “Refabricator” device to recycle plastic waste into high-quality filament for 3D printers to enable in situ fabrication and repair during space missions;
Using a centrifuge to provide a variety of gravity environments to study how cement solidifies — a process that NASA says is far more complex than it sounds, and could be key to safer, lightweight space habitats; and
Studying ultra-thin gas separation membranes of calcium-silicate that could lead to a more efficient way to filter carbon dioxide from waste gases, thereby reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Tamara Dietrich, 757-247-7892, tdietrich@dailypress.com, DP_Dietrich