The freighter Dragon docked with the International Space Station with a cargo of over two tons and, above all, its arrival turned into a birthday present for astronaut Megan McArthur, who turns 50.
Managed by SpaceX on behalf of NASA, Dragon hooked up to the Harmony module of the orbital station thanks to 12 mechanical stops and the load arrived in time to celebrate the birthday of the NASA astronaut, who arrived on the orbital station last April with the Crew mission 2.
"Congratulations to NASA and SpaceX and thank you: so far no one has sent me a space shuttle as a birthday present," said the astronaut in the connection with the NASA control center.
On board the freighter are supplies for the astronauts, which include fruit and ice cream, and materials for scientific experiments, such as ants and plants.
Launched on August 29 from Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida with a Falcon 9 rocket, the freighter carries more than 2 tons of materials of various kinds, from food supplies, including lemons, avocados and ice cream, to materials for new experiments, such as the Advanced Plant EXperiment-08 designed to study plant growth in microgravity conditions. There are also materials for the experiment conceived by the German Institute of Space Medicine which, in collaboration with the European Space Agency (ESA), aims to better understand the so-called neuro-ocular syndrome associated with apazio (Sans), which it has been found in some cases in astronauts who have returned after long space missions.
One of the most interesting experiments is the one developed by the Japanese start-up Gitai in collaboration with Nanoracks, which sees the protagonists of the robot arms that will be tested on board the Space Station to carry out a series of tasks of increasing complexity. The tests of the robots will be carried out inside the Nanoracks Bishop Airlock, a small module integrated with the ISS in 2020, to which Thales Alenia Space also contributed, while it is already planned to have the robots operate outside the Station in the coming months. Gitai's goal is in fact to develop small robots capable of moving in a vacuum to repair satellites or work on small asteroids to extract precious minerals.
