Closing out a five-week mission, a SpaceX Dragon cargo craft departed the International Space Station on Saturday. The spaceship will dive back into Earth’s atmosphere, deploy parachutes and splash down in the Pacific Ocean at 3:39 p.m. EDT (1939 GMT) about 265 miles west of Baja California.
Orbital Sciences Corp. is set to launch its next commercial resupply flight to the International Space Station on Monday after inspections revealed a rocket tracking station in Bermuda weathered a direct hit from Hurricane Gonzalo last week.
Two cosmonauts ventured outside the International Space Station, jettisoning three no-longer-needed components and carrying out a photo survey of the Russian segment of the lab complex in the seventh and final spacewalk planned by the station crew this year.
Rough seas in the Pacific Ocean will keep SpaceX’s Dragon cargo capsule in space a few days longer than planned, with the unpiloted supply ship’s return to Earth now set for Saturday hauling a load of research specimens from the International Space Station back to the ground.
Astronauts Reid Wiseman and Barry “Butch” Wilmore floated outside the International Space Station and, after a bit of trouble with a balky bolt, replaced a broken voltage regulator in one of eight solar power channels to restore the lab’s electrical grid to normal operation.
Working outside the International Space Station, NASA astronaut Reid Wiseman and European Space Agency crewmate Alexander Gerst successfully moved a failed ammonia pump module to an external stowage platform, completing a task originally planned for a repair spacewalk last December.
Officials with Canadian Earth observation company UrtheCast, which owns two cameras on the International Space Station’s Russian service module, outlined plans to install a remote sensing camera and a radar imaging payload on the outpost’s U.S.-owned Tranquility module in 2017.