SpaceX sends science experiements to space station
ORLANDO, Fla. — After a series of weather delays, SpaceX managed to send up a resupply mission to the International Space Station just before noon Monday.
A Falcon 9 rocket blasted off from Kennedy Space Center’s Launch Pad 39-A at 11:47 a.m. on the CRS-28 mission with a cargo Dragon spacecraft carrying nearly 7,000 pounds of supplies and science experiments.
The first-stage booster made its fifth flight with SpaceX once again recovering it downrange on its droneship A Shortfall of Gravitas in the Atlantic. The cargo Dragon is making its fourth trip to space, and is expected to dock early Tuesday morning with the ISS.
A big chunk of the weight flying in Dragon comes from the last pair of six new ISS Roll Out Solar Arrays, or iROSAs, that will be installed during a pair of spacewalks later this month. The $103 million replacements for the station’s existing arrays that have been used since 2000 will supply 30% more power and help ensure the station can be operational through NASA’s planned 2030 retirement.
Also headed up is more food for the seven crew members on board including fresh apples, blueberries, grapefruit, oranges, cheese and tomatoes.
“SpaceX 28 launch brings a great mix of payloads to add to the over 3,700 investigations flown to the ISS to date,” said Dr. Kirt Costello, chief scientist for the International Space Station Program Research Office during a conference call Friday. He noted 31 investigations for NASA and international partners are making the trip up this time.
One of the science investigations he highlighted looks at plant genetics, headed up by University of Florida researchers Anna-Lisa Paul and Robert Ferl. It involves the seeds collected from plants that were grown in space and brought back to Earth just this past April on the return flight of SpaceX CRS-27. These seeds were then planted and are now headed back to space.
“This investigation — Plant Habitat-03 — is probably our most complex mission to date,” Costello said. “Not only because it involves multiple flights where we have to grow out the plant on orbit, take samples and then prep them on the ground for re-flight, but because it’s really looking at the genetic nature of how life responds to the microgravity environment, and stress that’s created from living in that environment.”
The benefits could involve how to grow plants for multiple generations in space, but could also be used to help adapt plant life in challenging habitats on Earth, he said.
“It’s a very ambitious investigation, also one that really gets at the nature of what it means to live in a microgravity environment,” Costello said. “So for that reason, it stands out as one of our most complex and most ambitious missions.”
Another investigation run by the European Space Agency is called Thor-Davis, which will observe thunderstorms from the ISS.
“Thor Davis is looking for upward-directed lightning events over the tops of thunderclouds,” Costello said. “So the ISS is a perfect vantage point for these kinds of observations. They’ll be using an electronic combination with a camera from a nadir window to capture what are known as blue jet and other lightning phenomenon.”
A genetic experiment that was spearheaded by Boeing working with students from grades 7-12 will pick up where the year-in-space twin study involving former astronauts Mark and Scott Kelly left off. It looks to measure gene structures called telomeres that protect human chromosomes, but shorten with age and wear. In the Kelly twin study, these telomeres were only able to be measured while Scott Kelly was on Earth and not during his yearlong stay on the station. This study looks to measure them while in orbit.