The NASA partnered again with the private space agency SpaceX to send four astronauts to the International Space Station, three of which will go for the first time.
The mission crew “Crew-3“He will spend six months in the orbital post, conducting research in areas such as materials science, health and botany, to contribute to future deep space exploration and benefit life on Earth.
Americans Raja Chari |, Tom Marshburn and Kayla Barronas well as german Matthias Maurer, from European Space Agency (ESA), will take off aboard a spacecraft Crew Dragon called “Endurance” that will be fixed on a rocket Falcon 9.
The launch is scheduled for 02:21 local time (06:21 GMT) from Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
“Last night we were able to see the” Endurance “in the hangar, while it was preparing its transfer to the platform, we touched it with our hands, which is a very special experience,” said Chari, colonel of the United States Air Force and mission commander, at a press conference Wednesday.
Of the four, only Marshburn has traveled to space before. The medic flew aboard a space shuttle in 2009 and a Russian Soyuz spacecraft on a mission from 2012-2013.
Barron, who along with Chari was selected to the NASA Astronaut Corps in 2017, previously served as a submarine warfare officer for the Navy. He told reporters that he saw many parallels between that experience and going into space.
Maurer, a materials science engineer, will become the twelfth German to go into space and will join his fellow ESA astronaut, the French Thomas Pesquet, on the International Space Station (ISS in English). The two will probably coincide a few days before the Frenchman returns to Earth with the rest of his Crew-2 companions.
After a 22-hour journey, the “Endurance” will dock autonomously to the space station at 04:10 GMT on Monday.
The mission’s scientific highlights include an experiment to grow plants in space without soil or other growth media, and another to build microgravity fiber optics, which previous research has found will be of superior quality to those made on Earth.
Maurer will help commission the European robotic arm currently being installed on the Russian part of the ISS, and will test CIMON, an artificial intelligence assistant jointly developed by the German space agency. DLR, Airbus e IBM.
“It is an experiment that is really paving the way for exploration,” he said.
For example, he might one day act as a geology expert that astronauts on a future mission to Mars could refer to for quick answers, since the lag time to communicate with Earth would be 40 minutes, he said.
Crew-3 astronauts will also go on spacewalks to complete the station’s solar panel upgrade.
They will also be present on two tourist missions, which will include Japanese visitors aboard a Russian Soyuz spacecraft at the end of 2021, and the crew of Space-X Axiom, whose launch is scheduled for February 2022.
Reference-www.eleconomista.com.mx