Northrop Grumman’s Cygnus XL cargo spacecraft sits atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket counting right down to a launch focused at 7:41 a.m. EDT on Saturday to resupply the Expedition 74 crew. Packed with over 11,000 kilos of lab {hardware}, science experiments, and crew provides, Cygnus XL is because of arrive on the International Space Station the place it is going to be captured with the Candarm2 robotic arm on Monday.
NASA flight engineers Chris Williams and Jack Hathaway joined one another within the cupola on Friday and practiced capturing Cygnus XL throughout a pc simulation utilizing the robotics workstation. Williams and Hathaway skilled to make use of the workstation’s management panel and hand controllers to maneuver the Canadarm2. The duo watched digital camera views simulating the Cygnus XL approaching the station and ready for completely different seize eventualities.
Williams can be on the controls of the robotics workstation on Monday maneuvering the Canadarm2 to seize Cygnus XL whereas Hathaway screens the spacecraft’s strategy and rendezvous. Following its seize, mission controllers will take over and remotely command the Canadarm2 to put in Cygnus XL to the Unity module’s Earth-facing port the place it’ll keep for a six-month mission.
Watch the company’s Cygnus XL launch and arrival protection on NASA+, Amazon Prime, and the company’s YouTube channel. Learn the right way to watch NASA content by way of quite a lot of platforms, together with social media.
Afterward, Williams and Hathaway gathered along with flight engineers Jessica Meir of NASA and Sophie Adenot of ESA (European Space Agency) and referred to as right down to mission controllers to debate cargo operations after the hatches are opened on Cygnus XL. Inside the resupply ship can be a number of new science experiments together with a quantum physics module to increase the talents of the Cold Atom Lab, a blood stem cell study to deal with cancers and blood problems, an investigation to protect astronaut gut health, and extra.
In the Roscosmos phase of the orbital outpost, station commander Sergey Kud-Sverchkov and flight engineer Sergei Mikaev took turns sporting an acoustic sensor round their necks and recorded their fast exhalation to know how microgravity impacts the respiratory system. Flight engineer Andrey Fedyaev continued testing synthetic intelligence instruments to enhance house crew operations and communications.
Learn extra about station actions by following the space station blog, @space_station on X, in addition to the ISS Facebook and ISS Instagram accounts.
Get the most recent from NASA delivered each week. Subscribe here.
