SpaceX launched the 25th NASA Commercial Resupply Services (CRS-25) mission to the International Space Station (ISS) on July 15, atop a previously-flown Falcon 9.
The rocket lifted off from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center’s Launch Complex-39A at 8:44 p.m. EDT, propelling the Dragon spacecraft to orbit with over 5,800 pounds of cargo, including over 250 science research investigations, supplies, and hardware needed at the orbiting laboratory. Today, August 19th, the CRS-25 Dragon undocked from the ISS after around one month. At 11:00 a.m. EDT, NASA flight controllers on Earth sent commands to release the uncrewed SpaceX Dragon spacecraft from the forward port of the ISS Harmony module. The spacecraft was released at 11:05 a.m. EDT while the Space Station was flying at an altitude of 259 miles over the Pacific Ocean. SpaceX shared an incredible set of photographs of Dragon departing the Station, pictured below. “Goodbye to Dragon, thank you for all the supplies and science,” said NASA spacecraft communicator Michael Ellsworth from Mission Control in Houston, Texas. “We’re looking forward to your return to Earth
Congratulations to the team on a successful SpaceX-25 mission!” NASA astronaut Jessica Watkins said while she monitored the mission from abroad the ISS. On Friday, August 20, SpaceX Mission Control in Hawthorne, California, will command a deorbit burn of Dragon to allow the capsule to reenter Earth’s atmosphere. After re-entering Earth’s atmosphere, the spacecraft will make a targeted parachute-assisted splashdown at 2:53 p.m. EDT off the coast of Florida in the Atlantic Ocean, northeast of Cape Canaveral. A splashdown near the Kennedy Space Center (KSC) is crucial to ensure the science research on CRS-25 Dragon gets unloaded as soon as possible and delivered to scientists to minimize the effects of gravity’s interferenice with the results of the research conducted in microgravity. NASA does not plan to provide live coverage of the mission’s return to Earth tomorrow. The Dragon capsule will be fished out of the sea by a SpaceX recovery team that will load the vessel on top of a ship where biological samples will be unloaded and rapidly flown by a helicopter to KSC. NASA staff will catalog all the cargo and rapidly distribute it to scientists and organizations around the world
Source: this news is originally published by tesmanian