Dragon SpX-12 (CRS-12), CREAM - Falcon 9 - Kennedy LC-39A - 14.10.2017 16:31 UTC

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09/17/2017 16:55
As with its previous missions, SpaceX is not providing live coverage of the re-entry and splashdown of the Dragon supply ship. We'll post updates here as we get them.

Dragon should now be encountering the upper reaches of the atmosphere - a point known as entry interface - over the Pacific Ocean. Officials expect a communications blackout in the next few minutes, followed by deployment of the capsule's parachutes beginning at 10:06 a.m. EDT (1406 GMT).

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09/17/2017 16:58

Temperatures outside the Dragon spacecraft are expected to reach up to 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit during re-entry.

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09/17/2017 17:07

After deploying two drogue parachutes for stability, Dragon should now be descending through 10,000 feet under three 116-foot main parachutes, which are designed to slow the craft's speed to a gentle 11 mph at the time of splashdown.

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SpaceX‏Подлинная учетная запись @SpaceX 1 мин. назад

Dragon's drogue chutes have been deployed nominally.

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SpaceX‏Подлинная учетная запись @SpaceX 40 сек. назад

Dragon's three main parachutes have been deployed.

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!!!

SpaceX‏Подлинная учетная запись @SpaceX 25 сек. назад

Good splashdown of Dragon confirmed, completing its 12th mission to and from the @Space_Station.

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Chris B - NSF‏ @NASASpaceflight 2 мин. назад

Welcome Home CRS-12 Dragon! ARTICLE: https://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2017/09/crs-12-dragon-iss-mission-splashdown-return/ ... - COVERAGE: https://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=43716.0 ...

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CRS-12 Dragon completes her ISS mission with splashdown return

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https://spaceflightnow.com/2017/09/17/dragon-capsule-splashes-down-in-pacific-with-space-station-cargo/

Dragon capsule splashes down in Pacific with space station cargo   
September 17, 2017 Stephen Clark

Returning home fr om more than a month in orbit, a SpaceX Dragon supply ship departed the International Space Station and parachuted into the Pacific Ocean on Sunday with nearly two tons of research specimens and hardware, including mice sent up to investigate how spaceflight affects eyesight and locomotion.

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SpaceX's Dragon cargo capsule departed the space station early Sunday. This view of Dragon was captured by a camera on the station's Canadian-built robotic arm. Credit: NASA TV/Spaceflight Now

Wrapping up the 12th successful round-trip Dragon mission in 13 tries, the automated spaceship splashed down in the Pacific Ocean southwest of Los Angeles around 10:15 a.m. EDT (7:15 a.m. PDT; 1415 GMT) after a final descent under three main parachutes.

A SpaceX recovery team on standby in the Pacific Ocean just southwest of the Channel Islands will pull the floating capsule onto a ship and ferry it back to a port near Long Beach, California, in the next couple of days, wh ere ground crews will extract time-critical scientific specimens from the spacecraft for distribution to scientists.

SpaceX will transport the capsule to its facility in McGregor, Texas, for further unpacking and post-flight processing, allowing the company to potentially reuse the cargo carrier for a future mission.

The capsule was released from the space station's Canadian-built robotic arm at 4:40 a.m. EDT (0840 GMT) Sunday with a command sent by astronaut Paolo Nespoli. Three thruster firings sent the Dragon away from the research complex, setting up for a de-orbit burn shortly after 9 a.m. EDT (1300 GMT).

"We would like to give a big thanks to all the operational teams around the world that keep our presence in space possible, to the scientists and engineers that provide the outstanding research and equipment that we have in space, to NASA and all the space agencies that contribute to the space station, and to SpaceX for giving us this outstanding vehicle," Nespoli radioed from the space station. "Godspeed, Dragon 12."


Astronauts Paolo Nespoli (left) and Randy Bresnik (right) inside the space station's cupola module during Sunday's departure of the Dragon spacecraft. Credit: NASA/ESA/Paolo Nespoli

The Dragon spaceship launched to the space station Aug. 14 aboard a Falcon 9 rocket from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida, then reached the orbiting research outpost less than two days later with a delivery of more than 6,400 pounds of experiments and supplies.

NASA inked a $1.6 billion contract with SpaceX in 2008 for 12 logistics flights to the station. This mission wrapped up work under the original resupply contract, but NASA extended the agreement for eight additional cargo launches through 2019. SpaceX also has a separate, follow-on contract with NASA for at least six flights of upgraded Dragon cargo capsules to the station from 2019 through 2024.

Orbital ATK is NASA's other cargo transportation provider, using Cygnus supply ships launched on Antares or Atlas 5 rockets. Sierra Nevada Corp. is developing its own cargo vehicle, called the Dream Chaser, which will return landings on a runway like the space shuttle when it begins flying as soon as 2020.

The latest mission carried 20 mice to the space station and back to be examined after their return to the ground, aiding researchers studying how spaceflight affects vision and movement.

"We're looking at two different biomedical issues," said Michael Delp, principal investigator for the rodent research experiment from Florida State University, before the launch last month. "The first is visual impairment that occurs in some of the astronauts. To date, it only occurs in male astronauts, so we're looking at a couple of different aspects of how visual impairment may occur."

The mice were expected to come back to Earth inside the Dragon capsule alive, and SpaceX will hand over their transporters to scientists upon return to port in Southern California.

Researchers will examine the blood vessels inside animals' eyes and the blood-brain barrier that regulates fluid movement inside the skull.

"The second thing that we'll be doing is really looking at the brain circulation, and how that affects blood pressure within the skull," Delp said.

Part of the rodent research team will look at how an extended stay in the space station's weightless environment affects movement.

"In microgravity, you have a fairly severe physical inactivity, and that can affect a number of the organ systems, such as muscle and bone loss," Delp said.

One focus of the study will be on how much cartilage in joints degrade after spending time in microgravity. Mice have an accelerated metabolism and undergo changes faster than humans, so a month on the space station is roughly equivalent to a three-year expedition by an astronaut, according to Delp.

The space station cargo mission will also help biologists investigating Parkinson's disease, a chronic neurological disorder that affects a million people in the United States, and about five million worldwide.

"Although there are medications that ammeliorate the symptoms, we don't have any therapies that reverse or slow down the progression of the disease," said Marco Baptista, director of research and grants at the Michael J. Fox Foundation, which funded the station-bound experiment.

Scientists are sending a protein that causes Parkinson's to the station to measure how it grows without the influence of gravity. The protein, named LRRK2, could be targeted with drugs and therapies in Parkinson's patients if doctors understand it better.

"The next breakthrough we need is the solving of the crystal structure of LRRK2," Baptista said. "This is important for two reasons. First, it will allow us a better understanding of the biology of LRRK2 and secondly may help industry optimizing LRRK2 kinase inhibitors or develop novel ways to target LRRK2."

Growing the protein in microgravity "will lead to bigger crystals, more regular crystallization and crystals with higher intrinsic order," said Sebastian Mathea, the lead scientist on the LRRK2 experiment from the University of Oxford.

"With those crystals, we hopefully will be able to collect data that allow us to solve the three-dimensional structure of LRRK2, which hopefully will push forward the understanding of the onset of Parkinson's," Mathea said.

Another science team awaits results from an experiment probing how microgravity affects the growth of new lung tissue, specifically bio-engineered material tailored to repair damaged organs or reduce the chance of organ rejection in transplant patients.

Scientists have trouble managing the expansion of bio-engineered lung tissue on Earth. The tissue has trouble moving through structures designed to help shape it, and stem cells used to produce the tissue are slow to replicate, according to Joan Nichols, professor of internal medicine and infectious diseases and associate director of the Galveston National Laboratory at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston.

Nichols said microgravity offers a more benign environment, aiding in cell dispersal to help form more uniform tissues.

"We're getting two things out of this," she said. "We're getting a better plan and a better strategy for how to manage production of tissues using microgravity environment, and we're getting a model that's going to tell us what would happen in terms of lung repair on long-term spaceflight."

Other equipment delivered to the space station by Dragon last month included a supercomputer developed by Hewlett Packard Enterprise designed to help engineers gauge the ruggedness of commercial computer components in the harsh conditions of space.

While astronauts got to work in experiments inside the station's lab facilities, the Canadian and Japanese robotic arms removed a cosmic ray detector carried inside the Dragon's external payload bay for mounting on a facility outside the station's Japanese Kibo module.

Derived from an instrument carried aloft on high-altitude balloons, the Cosmic Ray Energetics and Mass, or CREAM, payload will spend at least three years sampling particles sent speeding through the universe by cataclysmic supernova explosions, and perhaps other exotic phenomena like dark matter.

Scientists think the subatomic particles could hold the key to unlocking mysteries about the universe.

Four small satellites inside the Dragon capsule were also transferred inside the space station for deployment later this year.

SpaceX's next Dragon cargo flight to the space station is scheduled for launch some time in December.

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https://blogs.nasa.gov/spacestation/2017/09/17/dragon-splashes-down-in-pacific-with-nasa-science-experiments/

Dragon Splashes Down in Pacific With NASA Science Experiments
Posted on September 17, 2017 at 1:53 pm by Mark Garcia.

SpaceX's Dragon cargo craft splashed down in the Pacific Ocean at approximately 10:14 a.m. EDT, southwest of Long Beach, California, and the recovery process is underway, marking the end of the company's twelfth contracted cargo resupply mission to the International Space Station for NASA.

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Expedition 53 Flight Engineer Paolo Nespoli of ESA (European Space Agency) and International Space Station Commander Randy Bresnik of NASA released the Dragon spacecraft earlier this morning at 4:40 a.m.

A variety of technological and biological studies are returning in Dragon. NASA and the Center for the Advancement of Science in Space (CASIS), the non-profit organization that manages research aboard the U.S. national laboratory portion of the space station, will receive time-sensitive samples and begin working with researchers to process and distribute them within 48 hours.

The Lung Tissue experiment used the microgravity environment of space to test strategies for growing new lung tissue. The ultimate goal of this investigation is to produce bioengineered human lung tissue that can be used as a predictive model of human responses allowing for the study of lung development, lung physiology or disease pathology.

Samples from the CASIS PCG 7 study used the orbiting laboratory's microgravity environment to grow larger versions of an important protein implicated in Parkinson's disease. Developed by the Michael J. Fox Foundation, Anatrace and Com-Pac International, researchers will look to take advantage of the station's microgravity environment which allows protein crystals to grow larger and in more perfect shapes than earth-grown crystals, allowing them to be better analyzed on Earth. Defining the exact shape and morphology of LRRK2 would help scientists to better understand the pathology of Parkinson's and aid in the development of therapies against this target.

Mice from NASA's Rodent Research-9 study also will return live to Earth for additional study. The investigation combined three studies into one mission, with two looking at how microgravity affects blood vessels in the brain and in the eyes and the third looking at cartilage loss in hip and knee joints. For humans on Earth, research related to limited mobility and degrading joints can help scientists understand how arthritis develops, and a better understanding of the visual impairments experienced by astronauts can help identify causes and treatments for eye disorders.

Dragon launched to the space station Aug. 14 from Launch Complex 39A at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida and arrived at the station Aug. 16, delivering more than 6,400 pounds of supplies and cargo.

Get breaking news, images, videos and features from the station on social media at:

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This entry was posted in Expedition 53 and tagged dragon, European Space Agency, International Space Station, NASA, progress, Roscosmos, Soyuz, spacex on September 17, 2017 by Mark Garcia.

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