SpaceX’s Dragon cargo capsule successfully splashed down in the Pacific Ocean today, carrying more than 3,000 pounds of cargo and science samples back down to Earth from the International Space Station.
NASA’s Kate Rubins and Japanese astronaut Takuya Onishi worked with the station’s robotic arm to pull the Dragon away from its berth and set it free at 3:11 a.m. PT. “Dragon depart successfully commanded,” Rubins reported.
Mission Control passed along thanks to the crew for their efforts, “and to the Dragon recovery team, fair winds and following seas.”
Over the five and a half hours that followed, SpaceX confirmed that the capsule successfully executed its deorbiting maneuvers and made a parachute-assisted splashdown, about 300 miles southwest of Baja California.
Dragon has been released from the @Space_Station! Three departure burns are now underway: https://t.co/XbCVPGwLuR pic.twitter.com/hfw5oeazHf
— SpaceX (@SpaceX) August 26, 2016
Good splashdown of Dragon confirmed, carrying thousands of pounds of @NASA science and research cargo back from the @Space_Station.
— SpaceX (@SpaceX) August 26, 2016
Recovery teams en route to Dragon, pic taken from about 10 miles out pic.twitter.com/B4ofhGZptD
— SpaceX (@SpaceX) August 26, 2016
#Dragon #SpX9 already out of the water and en-route to shore. https://t.co/swmXoPeFxO (SpaceX Photo) pic.twitter.com/3mcLpyvJlB
— ISS Updates (@ISS101) August 26, 2016
Now that the Dragon has been hoisted onto the recovery ship, it’ll be brought back to port at Long Beach, Calif. The capsule and most of the cargo will be processed at SpaceX’s facility in Texas, but the most time-sensitive science samples will be delivered quickly to NASA in California.
Among the shipments is a cage containing live mice that were sent into orbit aboard the Dragon last month to study how weightlessness affects patterns of gene expression. The mice will be dissected, and their sperm will be used for in-vitro fertilization of mouse embryos on Earth.
Japanese scientists plan to study whether the space environment has an effect on how genes work, for spacefliers and for their progeny.
“Information from this investigation serves as a proxy for understanding how the human body changes in space, and how those changes may affect later generations,” the science team says in a fact sheet on the experiment.
The robotic Dragon spaceship returned to Earth a little more than a month after delivering a new docking adapter, a DNA sequencer and more than two tons of additional supplies and equipment to the station.
The docking adapter was taken out of the capsule’s “trunk” and installed during a spacewalk last week. It will serve as the portal for commercial space taxis that are expected to start transporting astronauts to and from the space station sometime in the next couple of years.
