A Northrop Grumman Cygnus resupply spacecraft is on its way to the International Space Station with more than 8,200 pounds of science investigations and cargo after launching at 5:32 a.m. EST Monday from NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia. NASA Television, the NASA app, and the agency’s website will provide live coverage of the spacecraft’s approach beginning at 3:30 a.m. Wednesday, Nov. 9. Cygnus is scheduled to arrive at the space station around 5:05 a.m. Installation coverage will resume at 7:15 a.m. Watch all events at:
NASA astronaut Nicole Mann will use the space station’s robotic Canadarm2 to capture Cygnus upon its arrival, while NASA astronaut Josh Cassada monitors telemetry during rendezvous, capture, and installation on the Earth-facing port of the Unity module.
Northrop Grumman’s 18th cargo flight to the space station is the seventh under its Commercial Resupply Services 2 contract with NASA. The Cygnus spacecraft, which Northrop Grumman dubbed ‘S.S. Sally Ride’ after late NASA astronaut, physicist, and first American woman to fly in space, Sally Ride, launched on an Antares 230+ rocket from the Virginia Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport’s Pad 0A at Wallops.
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The resupply mission will support dozens of the more than 250 investigations that will be conducted during Expedition 68. Included in the scientific investigations are:
The BioFabrication Facility successfully printed a partial human knee meniscus and a large volume of human heart cells during its first trip to space in 2019. Now the facility is returning to the microgravity laboratory with new capabilities to further human tissue printing research. The 3D bioprinter tests whether microgravity enables the printing of tissue samples of higher quality than those printed on the ground. These technologies could be used to help alleviate organ shortages for patients in need of transplants.
Plants exposed to spaceflight undergo changes that involve the addition of extra information to their DNA, which regulates how genes turn on or off but does not change the sequence of the DNA itself. This process is known as epigenetic change.