#crs5

Dragon prepares to fly back to Earth.

After just shy of one month in space, SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft is preparing for its return to Earth tomorrow.

Today, space station crewmembers finished loading Dragon with 3,700 pounds of cargo scheduled for recovery. Hatches between the two vehicles were sealed ahead of tomorrow’s release from the station, which is scheduled for 2:09 pm EST.

The deorbit burn is scheduled for 7:00 PM EST, with splashdown occurring 44 minutes later at 7:44 PM EST.

Tuesday will be a busy day for the company, having two major operations occurring almost simultaneously. A Falcon 9 v1.1 rocket is scheduled to launch NASA’s DSCOVR mission at 6:05 PM EST. The vehicle’s first stage will perform a reentry burn in a second attempt to land the rocket on a seaborne landing barge.

Less than an hour after the Falcon’s landing attempt, Dragon will splash down off the coast of Baja California.

SpaceX releases video of Falcon 9 landing attempt. Earlier this morning, I posted an article on Elon Musk’s tweets to John Carmack showing images of the Falcon 9 attempting to land on the Autonomous Spaceport Drone Ship following the CRS-5 launch last week. Those images appear to have been video stills from a camera on the barge, and taken from the above video. SpaceX posted this footage to their Vine account at 11:53 AM EST today.  You can see the booster approaching the barge at a 45 degree angle following the failure of the hypersonic grid fins. This failure was caused by not enough hydraulic fluid in the grid fin control system, which in turn powered the system down.  The engine section of the booster explodes upon impact with the ASDS’s surface, causing residual booster propellant to explode. The upper portion of the booster continues to fall, careening off the side of the ship and into the ocean.

This is incredible footage of an extremely difficult maneuver. SpaceX will again attempt to land the first stage of their Falcon 9 rocket following the January 31 launch of DSCOVR.

Elon Musk releases images of Falcon 9 landing attempt Late last night, Elon Musk, CEO, founder and chief designer of SpaceX, tweeted images showing the failed landing attempt of his Falcon 9 last week. Four tweets were sent between 1:42 and 1:54 AM EST to John Carmack, Chief Technology Officer of Oculus VR and founder of Armadillo Aerospace with the above images.

Musk tweeted out a short description along with each image which describes in better detail the events of the landing attempt:

The captions below correlate to the images above, top to bottom:

Before impact, fins lose power and go hardover. Engines fights to restore, but …

Rocket hits hard at ~45 deg angle, smashing legs and engine section

Residual fuel and oxygen combine

Full RUD (rapid unscheduled disassembly) event. Ship is fine minor repairs. Exciting day!

This new information now paints a better picture of SpaceX’s landing attempt that could only be guessed at previously. It was theorized that the Falcon 9 first stage impacted the barge at a greater than normal velocity and toppled into the ocean. Images released last week showed the barge returning to its Jacksonville port with burn damage and metal fragments under tarps:

Musk also stated that the next landing attempt will occur on January 31, after a Falcon 9 launches NASA’s DSCOVR mission. 50% more hydraulic fluid will be added to the grid fins on this second attempt to ensure that they do not run out prematurely, as on this mission.

Early this morning (12 January, 2015), the Dragon spacecraft was grappled and berthed to the International Space Station.

The space stations Canadarm 2 Remote Manipulator System latched on to Dragon's grapple fixture at 5:54 AM EST. Once captured, the spacecraft was maneuvered to the nadir, or Earth-facing side of the Harmony module.

SpaceX’s Autonomous Spaceport Drone Ship (ASDS) returned to its port in Jacksonville, Florida earlier today (11 January 2015).

As seen in the image above, a portion of one of the barge’s corners have been significantly charred by the Falcon 9’s landing attempt. Additionally, portable hardware containers nearby were damaged, though as Elon Musk himself tweeted, the damage is not significant.

It is unclear what is under the tarps on the barge’s deck, though it could possibly be pieces of the Falcon 9 rocket.

The location of the damage near the corner and edge of the barge corroborates the details given by Musk on the landing attempt's failure. He stated that hydraulic fluid controlling the first stages control find ran out shortly before reaching the barge. The location of the damage lines up with the statement of a "hard" landing, as well as the loss of the rocket stage from toppling over in the ocean after impact.