Orbiter.ch Space News

mercredi 29 juin 2022

Crew Works Autonomous Medicine, Garbage Packing on Wednesday

ISS - Expedition 67 Mission patch.

June 29, 2022

International Space Station (ISS). Animation Credit: ESA

Wednesday’s schedule on the International Space Station encompassed practicing complicated medical procedures in microgravity to preparing to take out the trash 260 miles above the Earth. The Expedition 67 crew members also continued investigating a wide variety of space phenomena to improve life for humans on Earth and in space.

Future astronauts will need to work independently of mission controllers as they travel beyond low-Earth orbit to the Moon, Mars, and beyond. As a result, NASA Flight Engineers Kjell Lindgren and Bob Hines trained to diagnose and treat acute medical conditions without ground support today. Hines practiced ultrasound exams on Lindgren’s bladder and kidneys for the Autonomous Medical Officer Support demonstration, or AMOS. The study aims to help crews become more self-reliant and reduce mission risks as communication delays increase the farther a spacecraft ventures from Earth.

Image above: Astronaut Bob Hines monitors an Astrobee robotic free-flyer using smartphone technology to autonomously navigate and maneuver inside the station. Image Credit: NASA.

The orbiting lab’s four astronauts are also preparing to take out the trash this weekend requiring procedures more complicated than packing garbage on Earth. Astronauts Jessica Watkins of NASA and Samantha Cristoforetti of ESA (European Space Agency) finished loading trash containers in the NanoRacks Bishop airlock today. They were assisted by Lindgren and Hines as they closed the hatch to Bishop and depressurized the airlock. The trash container will be jettisoned towards Earth’s atmosphere for a fiery, but safe disposal on Saturday.

Station Commander Oleg Artemyev of Roscosmos studied ways future crew members might pilot spacecraft or control robots on planetary missions for a long-running Russian investigation. Flight Engineer Denis Matveev continued configuring nanosatellites for a future deployment and worked inside the ISS Progress 80 resupply ship on cargo operations. Cosmonaut Sergey Korsakov spent his day on electronics and computer maintenance before studying international crew dynamics and collecting radiation readings.

Related links:

Expedition 67: https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/expeditions/expedition67/index.html

Autonomous Medical Officer Support: https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/research/experiments/explorer/Investigation.html?#id=8173

NanoRacks Bishop airlock: https://www.nasa.gov/directorates/spacetech/spinoff/New_Doorway_to_Space

Pilot spacecraft or control robots: https://www.energia.ru/en/iss/researches/human/24.html

International crew dynamics: https://www.energia.ru/en/iss/researches/human/01.html

Space Station Research and Technology: https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/research/overview.html

International Space Station (ISS): https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/main/index.html

Image (mentioned), Animation (mentioned9, Text, Credits: NASA/Mark Garcia.

Best regards, Orbiter.ch

Help NASA Scientists Find Clouds on Mars

NASA - Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) patch.

Jun 29, 2022

By identifying clouds in data collected by NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, the public can increase scientists’ understanding of the Red Planet’s atmosphere.

Image above: NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover captured these clouds just after sunset on March 19, 2021, the 3,063rd Martian day, or sol, of the rover’s mission. The image is made up of 21 individual images stitched together and color corrected so that the scene appears as it would to the human eye. The clouds are drifting over “Mont Mercou,” a cliff face that Curiosity studied. Image Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS.

NASA scientists hope to solve a fundamental mystery about Mars’ atmosphere, and you can help. They’ve organized a project called Cloudspotting on Mars that invites the public to identify Martian clouds using the citizen science platform Zooniverse. The information may help researchers figure out why the planet’s atmosphere is just 1% as dense as Earth’s even though ample evidence suggests the planet used to have a much thicker atmosphere.

The air pressure is so low that liquid water simply vaporizes from the planet’s surface into the atmosphere. But billions of years ago, lakes and rivers covered Mars, suggesting the atmosphere must have been thicker then.

How did Mars lose its atmosphere over time? One theory suggests different mechanisms could be lofting water high into the atmosphere, where solar radiation breaks those water molecules down into hydrogen and oxygen (water is made of two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom). Hydrogen is light enough that it could then drift off into space.

Image above: Cloudspotting on Mars asks members of the public to look for arches such as this one in data collected by NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. Image Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech.

Like Earth, Mars has clouds made of water ice. But unlike Earth, it also has clouds made of carbon dioxide (think: dry ice), which form when it gets cold enough for the Martian atmosphere to freeze locally. By understanding where and how these clouds appear, scientists hope to better understand the structure of Mars’ middle atmosphere, which is about 30 to 50 miles (50 to 80 kilometers) in altitude.

“We want to learn what triggers the formation of clouds – especially water ice clouds, which could teach us how high water vapor gets in the atmosphere – and during which seasons,” said Marek Slipski, a postdoctoral researcher at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California.

That’s where Cloudspotting on Mars comes in. The project revolves around a 16-year record of data from the agency’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), which has been studying the Red Planet since 2006. The spacecraft’s Mars Climate Sounder instrument studies the atmosphere in infrared light, which is invisible to the human eye. In measurements taken by the instrument as MRO orbits Mars, clouds appear as arches. The team needs help sifting through that data on Zooniverse, marking the arches so that the scientists can more efficiently study where in the atmosphere they occur.

Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). Image Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech

“We now have over 16 years of data for us to search through, which is very valuable – it lets us see how temperatures and clouds change over different seasons and from year to year,” said Armin Kleinboehl, Mars Climate Sounder’s deputy principal investigator at JPL. “But it’s a lot of data for a small team to look through.”

While scientists have experimented with algorithms to identify the arches in Mars Climate Sounder data, it’s much easier for humans to spot them by eye. But Kleinboehl said the Cloudspotting project may also help train better algorithms that could do this work in the future. In addition, the project includes occasional webinars in which participants can hear from scientists about how the data will be used.

Cloudspotting on Mars is the first planetary science project to be funded by NASA’s Citizen Science Seed Funding program. The project is conducted in collaboration with the International Institute for Astronautical Sciences. For more NASA citizen science opportunities, go to https://science.nasa.gov/citizenscience

JPL, a division of Caltech in Pasadena, California, leads the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter mission – as well as the Mars Climate Sounder instrument – for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington.

Related links:

Cloudspotting on Mars: https://www.zooniverse.org/projects/marek-slipski/cloudspotting-on-mars/classify

NASA’s Citizen Science Seed Funding program: https://www.nasa.gov/feature/nasa-s-citizen-science-program-is-expanding-23-new-grants-awarded-for-scientific-research

Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO): http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/MRO/main/index.html

Images (mentioned), Text, Credits: NASA/Tony Greicius/Karen Fox/Alana Johnson/JPL/Andrew Good.

Greetings, Orbiter.ch

Tianwen-1 orbiter completes planned scientific mission

CNSA - Tianwen-1 (天問-1) Mission to Mars logo.

June 29, 2022

According to the China National Space Administration (CNSA), as of 29 June 2022, the Tianwen-1 orbiter has completed the planned scientific exploration mission of Mars.

In 706 days, Tianwen-1 completed 1344 orbits around Mars, imaging the entire planet with its Moderate Resolution Imaging Camera (MoRIC).

Tianwen-1 orbiter completes planned scientific mission

Best regards, Orbiter.ch

Impact in 2052 ruled out as ESA counts down to Asteroid Day

ESA - Asteroid Watch logo.

June 29, 2022

In brief

Just in time for worldwide Asteroid Day: a threatening space rock lingered at the top of risk lists around the globe for months, with a real chance of impacting Earth on 2 April 2052. Now, ESA’s asteroid team working with experts at the European Southern Observatory have officially removed ‘2021 QM1’ from their asteroid risk list, a result of skilled observations and analysis of the faintest asteroid ever observed with one of the most sensitive telescopes in the world.

With Asteroid Day Live 2022 set for 30 June, we can safely say that the riskiest asteroid known to humankind in the last year will not strike – at least not for the next century.

A busy field of stars hide once-risky asteroid 2021 QM1

*What was it like to track this asteroid? Get the full story in ESA’s fascinating behind-the-scenes look at how European experts handle asteroid risks in the official countdown to Asteroid Day live on 30 June, airing at 10:30 CEST on AsteroidDay.org and via ESA WebTV.*

https://asteroidday.org/

https://www.esa.int/ESA_Multimedia/ESA_Web_TV

In-depth

Impact 2052

2021 QM1 was initially discovered on 28 August 2021 by the Mount Lemmon observatory, located north of Tucson, Arizona. To start, nothing stood out as unusual about the discovery – about a dozen new near-Earth asteroids are discovered every dark night. Routine follow-up observations were then acquired from telescopes around the globe, but these started to tell a more worrying story.

“These early observations gave us more information about the asteroid’s path, which we then projected into the future,” said Richard Moissl, ESA’s Head of Planetary Defence.

“We could see its future paths around the Sun, and in 2052 it could come dangerously close to Earth. The more the asteroid was observed, the greater that risk became.”

How asteroids go from threat to no sweat

It’s important to note that orbit calculations based on just a few nights of observations come with some uncertainty, which is why asteroids often get onto ESA’s risk list soon after they are discovered and are then removed once more data is gathered, uncertainties shrink, and the asteroid is proven safe. On this occasion, that wasn’t possible.

Unfortunate cosmic alignment

Just as the risk appeared to be increasing, an (im)perfect cosmic alignment occurred: the asteroid’s path brought it closer to the Sun as seen from Earth, and for months it became impossible to see due to our star’s brilliant glare.

2021 QM1's orbit as it passed closer to Sun in the sky as seen from Earth, soon after discovery

“We just had to wait,” explained Marco Micheli, Astronomer at ESA’s Near-Earth Object Coordination Centre (NEOCC).

“But to cap things off, we knew that 2021 QM1 was also moving away from Earth in its current orbit – meaning by the time it passed out of the Sun’s glare, it could be too faint to detect.”

While they waited, they prepared.

Priority access to one of Earth’s most powerful telescopes

The European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) was primed and ready. As soon as the 50-meter asteroid edged out from the sunlight – and if and when weather conditions allowed – ESO’s VLT would focus its 8 m mirror on the disappearing rock.

Dramatic moonset behind ESO's Very Large Telescope (VLT), Chile

“We had a brief window in which to spot our risky asteroid,” explained Olivier Hainaut, Astronomer at ESO.

“To make matters worse, it was passing through a region of the sky with the Milky Way just behind. Our small, faint, receding asteroid would have to be found against a backdrop of thousands of stars. These would turn out to be some of the trickiest asteroid observations we have ever made”.

Faintest asteroid ever observed

Over the night of 24 May, ESO’s VLT took a series of new images. The data arrived and Olivier and Marco began to process them, stacking subsequent observations on top of each other and removing the background stars: it took some time.

Image above: ESO’s Very Large Telescope captures 2021 QM1 which for months topped risk lists around the glob. This pivotal sighting ruled out Earth impact in the year 2052.

The result? A positive detection of the faintest asteroid ever observed. With a magnitude of 27 on the scale used by astronomers to describe the brightness of objects in the sky, 2021 QM1 was 250 million times fainter than the faintest stars visible to the naked eye from a dark spot. (In this astronomical scale of visible magnitudes, the brighter an object appears the lower the value of its magnitude, while the brightest objects reach negative values, e.g. the Sun is magnitude -27).

Olivier was certain this small blur was in fact an asteroid, and Marco was certain that given its location, it was our asteroid.

Safe at last?

With these new observations, our risky asteroid’s path was refined, ruling out an impact in 2052, and 2021 QM1 was removed from ESA’s risk list. Another 1377 remain.

Asteroids on 13 June 2022 with Gaia

More than one million asteroids have been discovered in the Solar System, almost 30 000 of which pass near Earth, with many more expected to be out there. ESA’s Planetary Defence Office, NEOCC and astronomers around the globe are looking up to keep us safe, working together to ensure we know well in advance if an asteroid is discovered on a collision course.

Watch Asteroid Day Live 30 June

How worried are the world’s asteroid experts? How did it feel to track humankind’s most risky asteroid? Get the full story in ESA’s 30-minute programme counting down to Asteroid Day live on 30 June, airing at 10:30 CEST on AsteroidDay.org and on ESA WebTV.

Tunguska devastation

Asteroid Day is the United Nations-sanctioned day of public awareness of the risks of asteroid impacts, held annually on 30 June. This year sees its return to Luxembourg for an in-person event following two years of living entirely in the virtual realm. Asteroid experts from ESA, from across Europe and worldwide will converge on the city to take part in a packed four-hour live programme of panels and one-on-one interviews.

Related links:

https://asteroidday.org/

https://www.esa.int/ESA_Multimedia/ESA_Web_TV

ESA’s Near-Earth Object Coordination Centre (NEOCC): https://www.esa.int/Safety_Security/Near-Earth_Object_Coordination_Centre

ESA’s Planetary Defence: https://www.esa.int/Safety_Security/Planetary_Defence

Mount Lemmon observatory: https://skycenter.arizona.edu/

European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (VLT): https://www.eso.org/public/teles-instr/paranal-observatory/vlt/

Safety & Security: https://www.esa.int/Safety_Security

Images, Animation, Video, Text, Credits: ESA/ESO/O. Hainaut/G.Gillet/ESA/Gaia/DPAC; CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO/Public domain – N. A. Setrukov, 1928.

Best regards, Orbiter.ch

Swarm of Tiny Swimming Robots Could Look for Life on Distant Worlds

NASA - Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) logo.

June 29, 2022

A concept in development at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory would allow potential planetary missions to chase interesting clues in subsurface oceans.

Images above: In the Sensing With Independent Micro-Swimmers (SWIM) concept, illustrated here, dozens of small robots would descend through the icy shell of a distant moon via a cryobot – depicted on above image – to the ocean below. The project has received funding from the NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts program. Images Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech.

Someday, a swarm of cellphone-size robots could whisk through the water beneath the miles-thick icy shell of Jupiter’s moon Europa or Saturn’s moon Enceladus, looking for signs of alien life. Packed inside a narrow ice-melting probe that would tunnel through the frozen crust, the tiny robots would be released underwater, swimming far from their mothercraft to take the measure of a new world.

That’s the vision of Ethan Schaler, a robotics mechanical engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, whose Sensing With Independent Micro-Swimmers (SWIM) concept was recently awarded $600,000 in Phase II funding from the NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) program. The funding, which follows his 2021 award of $125,000 in Phase I NIAC funding to study feasibility and design options, will allow him and his team to make and test 3D-printed prototypes over the next two years.

A key innovation is that Schaler’s mini-swimmers would be much smaller than other concepts for planetary ocean exploration robots, allowing many to be loaded compactly into an ice probe. They would add to the probe’s scientific reach and could increase the likelihood of detecting evidence of life while assessing potential habitability on a distant ocean-bearing celestial body.

“My idea is, where can we take miniaturized robotics and apply them in interesting new ways for exploring our solar system?” Schaler said. “With a swarm of small swimming robots, we are able to explore a much larger volume of ocean water and improve our measurements by having multiple robots collecting data in the same area.”

Image above: This illustration shows the NASA cryobot concept called Probe using Radioisotopes for Icy Moons Exploration (PRIME) deploying tiny wedge-shaped robots into the ocean miles below a lander on the frozen surface of an ocean world. Image Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech.

Not yet part of any NASA mission, the early-stage SWIM concept envisions wedge-shaped robots, each about 5 inches (12 centimeters) long and about 3 to 5 cubic inches (60 to 75 cubic centimeters) in volume. About four dozen of them could fit in a 4-inch-long (10-centimeter-long) section of a cryobot 10 inches (25 centimeters) in diameter, taking up just about 15% of the science payload volume. That would leave plenty of room for more powerful but less mobile science instruments that could gather data during the long journey through the ice and provide stationary measurements in the ocean.

The Europa Clipper mission, planned for a 2024 launch, will begin gathering detailed science during multiple flybys with a large suite of instruments when it arrives at the Jovian moon in 2030. Looking further into the future, cryobot concepts to investigate such ocean worlds are being developed through NASA’s Scientific Exploration Subsurface Access Mechanism for Europa (SESAME) program, as well as through other NASA technology development programs.

Better Together

As ambitious as the SWIM concept is, its intent would be to reduce risk while enhancing science. The cryobot would be connected via a communications tether to the surface-based lander, which would in turn be the point of contact with mission controllers on Earth. That tethered approach, along with limited space to include large propulsion system, means the cryobot would likely be unable to venture much beyond the point where ice meets ocean.

“What if, after all those years it took to get into an ocean, you come through the ice shell in the wrong place? What if there’s signs of life over there but not where you entered the ocean?” said SWIM team scientist Samuel Howell of JPL, who also works on Europa Clipper. “By bringing these swarms of robots with us, we’d be able to look ‘over there’ to explore much more of our environment than a single cryobot would allow.”

Howell compared the concept to NASA’s Ingenuity Mars Helicopter, the airborne companion to the agency’s Perseverance rover on the Red Planet. “The helicopter extends the reach of the rover, and the images it is sending back are context to help the rover understand how to explore its environment,” he said. “If instead of one helicopter you had a bunch, you would know a lot more about your environment. That’s the idea behind SWIM.”

SWIM would also allow data to be gathered away from the cryobot’s blazing-hot nuclear battery, which the probe would rely on to melt a downward path through the ice. Once in the ocean, that heat from the battery would create a thermal bubble, slowly melting the ice above and potentially causing reactions that could change the water’s chemistry, Schaler said.

Additionally, the SWIM robots could “flock” together in a behavior inspired by fish or birds, thereby reducing errors in data through their overlapping measurements. That group data could also show gradients: temperature or salinity, for example, increasing across the swarm’s collective sensors and pointing toward the source of the signal they’re detecting.

“If there are energy gradients or chemical gradients, that’s how life can start to arise. We would need to get upstream from the cryobot to sense those,” Schaler said.

Each robot would have its own propulsion system, onboard computer, and ultrasound communications system, along with simple sensors for temperature, salinity, acidity, and pressure. Chemical sensors to monitor for biomarkers – signs of life – will be part of Schaler’s Phase II study.

More About NIAC

NIAC is funded by NASA’s Space Technology Mission Directorate, which is responsible for developing the new cross-cutting technologies and capabilities needed by the agency. The program fosters exploration by funding early-stage studies to evaluate technologies that could support future aeronautics and space missions. Researchers across U.S. government, industry, and academia with high-impact ideas can submit proposals: https://www.nasa.gov/content/apply-to-niac

Related links:

Phase II funding: https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/nasa-selects-futuristic-space-technology-concepts-for-early-study

NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC): https://www.nasa.gov/directorates/spacetech/niac/index.html

Phase I NIAC funding: https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/futuristic-space-technology-concepts-selected-by-nasa-for-initial-study

Europa Clipper: https://europa.nasa.gov/

Scientific Exploration Subsurface Access Mechanism for Europa (SESAME): https://www1.grc.nasa.gov/space/pesto/space-vehicle-technologies-current/scientific-exploration-subsurface-access-mechanism-for-europa-sesame/

Images (mentioned), Text, Credits: NASA/JPL/Melissa Pamer.

Greetings, Orbiter.ch

mardi 28 juin 2022

Cygnus Leaves Station as Crew Maintains Research and Operations

ISS - Expedition 67 Mission patch.

June 28, 2022

The Expedition 67 crew said farewell to a U.S. cargo craft on Tuesday morning and is planning for the arrival of another resupply ship in mid-July. The seven International Space Station residents also split their day with a host of scientific and operational activities.

Northrop Grumman’s Cygnus space freighter completed its four-month cargo mission attached to the Unity module after the Canadarm2 robotic arm released it into Earth orbit at 7:07 a.m. EDT on Tuesday morning. The trash-filled commercial cargo craft will descend into Earth’s atmosphere and burn up safely above the Pacific Ocean on Wednesday. Cygnus delivered over 8,300 pounds of science and supplies when it arrived for capture and installation to Unity on Feb. 21, 2022.

Cygnus cargo departure from ISS. Animation Credit: ESA

The next resupply mission to visit the station is targeted for launch no earlier than July 14. The SpaceX Dragon cargo craft will be loaded with numerous new science experiments to investigate phenomena such as space-caused rapid aging, metabolic interactions in soil microbes, and cell-free production of proteins.

The station’s newest U.S. component, the NanoRacks Bishop airlock, was configured on Tuesday by NASA Flight Engineers Kjell Lindgren and Bob Hines. The duo removed cargo stowed inside the airlock and replaced it with a trash container that will be deployed this weekend outside the airlock to burn up harmlessly in Earth’s atmosphere. Bishop was delivered to the station aboard the SpaceX Dragon cargo craft on Dec. 6, 2020, and installed on the Tranquility module on Dec. 19.

Lindgren and NASA astronaut Jessica Watkins also took turns conducting a test simulating robotics maneuvers for the Behavioral Core Measures space psychology study. Watkins then joined Hines as they continued to film station operation videos to train future crew members on the ground.

Image above: Astronauts (from left) Jessica Watkins, Bob Hines, Kjell Lindgren, and Samantha Cristoforetti share a light moment during an interview with officials on Earth. Image Credit: NASA.

ESA (European Space Agency) Flight Engineer Samantha Cristoforetti swapped samples inside the Electrostatic Levitation Furnace, an advanced research device that enables high-temperature thermophysics studies. Afterward, she conducted public affairs activities for ESA.

In the station’s Russian segment, Commander Oleg Artemyev worked on electrical and computer systems. Roscosmos Flight Engineer Denis Matveev configured nanosatellites for an upcoming deployment and serviced life support hardware. Roscosmos Flight Engineer Sergey Korsakov filmed his portion of station activities then explored advanced Earth photography techniques.

Related article:

Cygnus Completes Station Mission After Four Months
https://orbiterchspacenews.blogspot.com/2022/06/cygnus-completes-station-mission-after.html

Related links:

Expedition 67: https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/expeditions/expedition67/index.html

Unity module: https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/structure/elements/unity

Canadarm2: https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/structure/elements/remote-manipulator-system-canadarm2/

NanoRacks Bishop airlock: https://www.nasa.gov/directorates/spacetech/spinoff/New_Doorway_to_Space

Tranquility module: https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/structure/elements/tranquility/

Behavioral Core Measures: https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/research/experiments/explorer/Investigation.html?#id=7537

Electrostatic Levitation Furnace: https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/research/experiments/explorer/Facility.html?#id=1536

Advanced Earth photography techniques: https://www.energia.ru/en/iss/researches/develop/04.html

Space Station Research and Technology: https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/research/overview.html

International Space Station (ISS): https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/main/index.html

Image (mentioned), Animation (mentioned), Text, Credits: NASA/Mark Garcia.

Best regards, Orbiter.ch

NASA, SpaceX Target New Launch Date for Commercial Resupply Mission

SpaceX - Dragon CRS-25 Mission patch.

June 28, 2022

NASA and SpaceX now are targeting no earlier than Wednesday, July 14, for launch of the CRS-25 commercial resupply services mission to the International Space Station. The new target launch date supports ongoing Dragon spacecraft inspections as well as repair and replacement of any components that could have degraded by exposure to mono-methyl hydrazine (MMH) vapor found during testing in early June. In order to allow a more detailed off-vehicle inspection of the parachutes, the SpaceX team made the decision to replace the main parachutes on this spacecraft.

Image above: The pressurized capsule of the SpaceX Cargo Dragon resupply ship with its nose cone open is pictured as the vehicle departs the International Space Station on Jan. 23, 2022. Image Credit: NASA.

The new date also allows for launch of the uncrewed cargo mission for the earliest possible rendezvous opportunity with the International Space Station following the upcoming high-beta angle period when the sun angle with space station’s orbital plane causes problems with thermal and power generation at the microgravity laboratory in the planned docking attitude for visiting spacecraft.

Related links:

SpaceX: https://www.spacex.com/

International Space Station (ISS): https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/main/index.html

Image (mentioned), Text, Credits: NASA/Heidi Lavelle.

Greetings, Orbiter.ch