SpaceX launched its 25th cargo mission to the International Space Station (ISS) on Thursday (July 14), with more than 5,800 pounds (2,630 kg) of supplies, along with equipment for NASA climate change research.
The supply mission, called the CRS-25, was blown up from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. After just 2.5 minutes of flying, the first stage of the rocket came loose and made a safe, upright landing five minutes later on SpaceX’s drone ship “A Shortfall of Gravitas” in the Atlantic. The second stage of the rocket continued upward into orbit, propelling itself and the unmanned Dragon reconnaissance craft mounted on its nose.
The Dragon spacecraft is expected to slowly catch up with the ISS and reach it on Saturday morning (July 16) around 11:20 EDT. After Dragon has added to the orbiting lab, astronauts will unload the capsule’s payload, which includes fresh food and supplies, as well as scientific equipment for the ISS’s dozens of active scientific investigations.
One of the assignment’s bulky and most important deliveries is the equipment for Earth Surface Mineral Dust Source Investigation (EMIT). Once attached to the outside of the ISS, this experiment will scan Earth to study how dust from dry areas travels on winds and affects the climate. (Researchers still do not know if mineral dust has an overall heating or cooling effect.)
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“Understanding the composition of dust is the key to understanding warming versus cooling and how much, both on a regional and global scale,” said Roger Clark, a senior researcher at the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson, Arizona, and a co-researcher on the EMIT mission. said in a statement. “Depending on the composition of the dust, it can cool or heat the planet. Dark dust, including dust with iron oxides, can cause warming, while light dust can result in cooling. Dust also plays a role in ecosystems and human health.”
Despite the importance of dust in climate models, it has remained underestimated.
“Currently, the dam effects of climate change are based on about 5,000 soil samples for the entire earth,” Clark said. “EMIT will collect more than 1 billion useful measurements for the arid regions of the world.”
EMIT can accurately measure the content of Earth’s dust from space using a technique called imaging spectrometry, where incoming light is divided into distinct wavelengths ranging from ultraviolet to infrared. Because specific minerals inside dust clouds only reflect certain wavelengths, EMIT can identify the composition of dust clouds by breaking them down into 288 possible colors. Following this identification, the spectrometer will use unique software to map the detected materials to their locations around the world.
The launch of the CRS-25 has been long overdue. The mission, originally scheduled to launch more than a month ago, was held back three times after engineers discovered potentially unsafe levels of corrosive hydrazine vapor – a fuel used in Dragon’s Draco propellers – in the vehicle’s propulsion system. NASA and SpaceX engineers carefully inspected the rocket before finally giving the green light.
Other experiments on the way to the ISS will investigate the effects of aging on cellular repair and investigate whether these effects can be reversed in astronauts after they return to Earth, as well as study the feasibility of making concrete from materials found in low-gravity environments in moon and Mars.
Originally published on Live Science.
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