NASA commercial partner Orbital Sciences Corporation launched its Cygnus
cargo spacecraft aboard the Antares rocket at 1:07 p.m. EST Thursday
from the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport Pad 0A at NASA’s Wallops Flight
Facility in Virginia for the Orbital-1 cargo resupply mission to the International Space Station.
At the time of launch the station was flying about 260 miles over the Atlantic Ocean just off the coast of Brazil.
Over the next two and a half days, Cygnus will perform a series of
engine firings to put it on track for a Sunday morning rendezvous with
the station. When the vehicle reaches the capture point about 30 feet
from the complex, Expedition 38 Flight Engineers Mike Hopkins and Koichi
Wakata will use Canadarm2, the station’s 57-foot robotic arm, to reach
out and grapple Cygnus at 6:02 a.m. The crew then will use the robotic
arm to guide Cygnus to its berthing port on the Earth-facing side of the
Harmony node for installation beginning around 6:20 a.m.
NASA television coverage of the rendezvous and berthing begins at 5
a.m. Sunday, followed at 7 a.m. with coverage of the installation.
For its first official commercial resupply mission, designated
Orbital-1, Cygnus is delivering 2,780 pounds of supplies to the space
station, including vital science experiments for the Expedition 38 crew
members aboard the orbiting laboratory. Orbital Sciences successfully
proved the capability of the Cygnus spacecraft during its first and only
demonstration flight to the station back in September 2013.
Cygnus will remain at the station until mid-February when it will be
unberthed from the station for a destructive re-entry over the Pacific
Ocean. That departure will clear the way for the arrival of Space
Exploration Technologies’ SpaceX-3 commercial cargo mission aboard the
Dragon spacecraft. These two back-to-back resupply missions by U.S.
companies will mark a milestone in NASA’s ability to deliver critical
new science payloads to the only laboratory in space.
The launch of Antares was scheduled for Thursday after a launch
attempt on Wednesday was scrubbed due to an unusually high level of
space radiation that exceeded constraints imposed on Antares. Orbital
conducted a comprehensive review of data related to the radiation
environment in space, further reviews and modeling of the rocket’s
avionics systems, and the forecast for favorable terrestrial weather
conditions at Wallops. Upon a deeper examination of the space weather
environment, Orbital’s engineering team, in consultation with NASA,
determined that the risk to launch success was within acceptable limits
established at the outset of the Antares program.
With a busy weekend of Cygnus capture activities ahead of them,
Hopkins, Wakata and Flight Engineer Rick Mastracchio enjoyed a mostly
off-duty day Thursday aboard the station to relax and recharge.
Hopkins and Wakata began their day with a series of eye exams for the
Ocular Health study. Vision changes have been observed in some
astronauts returning from long-duration spaceflight, and researchers
want to learn more about its root causes and develop countermeasures to
minimize this risk.
Wakata also downloaded data from sensors he wore for a 36-hour data
collection period of the Circadian Rhythms study. The knowledge gleaned
from this experiment will not only provide important insights into the
adaptations of the human autonomic nervous system in space over time,
but also has significant practical implications by helping to improve
physical exercise, rest- and work shifts as well as fostering adequate
workplace illumination.
In the afternoon, Hopkins, Mastracchio and Wakata participated in a
debrief with support personnel on the ground to review the two U.S.
spacewalks conducted in late December to remove and replace a faulty
ammonia pump module. That pair of spacewalks conducted by Hopkins and
Mastracchio with robotic assistance from Wakata at the controls of
Canadarm2 successfully restored an external cooling loop that uses
ammonia to prevent station systems from overheating.
Commander Oleg Kotov and Flight Engineer Sergey Ryazanskiy spent much
of their day replacing lights in the Russian segment of the station.
Ryazanskiy also performed the Uragan Earth-observation experiment,
which seeks to document and predict the development of natural and
man-made disasters on Earth.
Flight Engineer Mikhail Tyurin began the day conducting routine daily
maintenance on the life-support system in the Zvezda service module.
Afterward he joined Kotov for a familiarization session for the KAPLYA-2
experiment, which is studying the hydrodynamics and heat transfer of
monodisperse drop flows in space.
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