CRS-31: SpaceX Dragon Delivers Cargo To The Space Station

A SpaceX Dragon cargo spacecraft carrying 2,700 kilograms of food, equipment and experiments docked with the International Space Station (ISS) Tuesday(Nov. 5) at 1404 UTC, about 11 minutes ahead of schedule. It launched atop a Falcon 9 rocket from Pad 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center (KSC) in Florida at 0129 UTC, kicking off the company's 31st robotic cargo resupply mission(CRS-31) to the ISS for NASA.

This was this particular Falcon 9 booster's fifth launch and landing, according to a SpaceX mission description. It returned to Earth as expected, landing about 8 minutes after liftoff at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, next door to KSC. This is also the 400th successful launch of the company's Falcon 9 rocket.

The Falcon 9 upper stage, meanwhile, hauled the uncrewed Cargo Dragon skywards deploying it to low Earth orbit, around 9.5 minutes after launch. The Dragon then began chasing down the ISS, finally catching up and docking with the space station, over 13 hours later, at the forward port of the space station's Harmony module, which was occupied with another Dragon until recently.

According to NASA, CRS-31 includes several new experiments targeting investigations such as the solar wind, or the constant stream of charged particles from our sun, as well as investigations about plant growth in microgravity, cold welding of metals and how radiation in space influences the weathering of various materials.

"In addition to food, supplies, and equipment for the crew, Dragon will deliver several new experiments, including the Coronal Diagnostic Experiment, to examine solar wind and how it forms," NASA officials wrote in a mission preview. "Dragon also delivers Antarctic moss to observe the combined effects of cosmic radiation and microgravity on plants. Other investigations aboard include a device to test cold welding of metals in microgravity, and an investigation that studies how space impacts different materials."

Also aboard the Dragon is LignoSat, a tiny wooden probe developed by researchers at Kyoto University and the Japanese logging company Sumitomo Forestry that could help open up a new realm of more environmentally friendly spacecraft manufacturing.

"The main objective here is to determine whether wood can be used in space," Meghan Everett, the deputy chief scientist for NASA's International Space Station program, said in a prelaunch briefing today. "Student researchers will measure the temperature and strain of the wooden structure and see how it might change in the vacuum environment of space, and the atomic oxygen and radiation conditions as well."