A little while ago, SpaceX’s Dragon 2 spacecraft docked with the International Space Station’s Harmony module completing the first part of its CRS-28 mission. Astronaut Woody Hoburg monitored the operation assisted by his fellow astronaut Frank Rubio, but the cargo spacecraft, which blasted off when it was Monday morning in the USA, completed the maneuvers automatically without any problem.
A little while ago, the SpaceX Dragon 2 spacecraft blasted off atop a Falcon 9 rocket from the Kennedy Space Center in its CRS-28 (Cargo Resupply Service 28) mission, also referred to as SPX-28. After almost exactly 12 minutes it separated successfully from the rocket’s last stage and went en route. This is the 28th mission for the Dragon/Dragon 2 spacecraft to resupply the International Space Station with various cargoes and then return to Earth, again with various cargoes.
A few hours ago, the three Chinese taikonauts of the Shenzhou 15 mission returned to Earth after spending a little more than six months on the Chinese space station Tiangong. The three taikonauts Fei Junlong, Deng Qingming, and Zhang Lu had left the station a few hours earlier to land at a site called Dongfeng in China’s Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region. A procedure that significantly reduces the time to return to Earth already tested in the past worked again and is becoming routine.
An article published in the journal “Nature” reports the results of an examination of the exoplanet WASP-18b. A team of researchers used the James Webb Space Telescope to map the temperatures on the surface of this ultra-hot Jupiter very close to its star. The temperature variations are around 1,000° Kelvin between the hottest area always facing its star and the border area between day and night. Webb’s Near-Infrared Imager and Slitless Spectrograph (NIRISS) also found traces of water vapor that other instruments had missed.
A few hours ago, SpaceX’s Crew Dragon Freedom spacecraft concluded its Ax-2 mission by splashing down without problems. On board were Peggy Whitson, Ali AlQarni, John Shoffner, and Rayyanah Barnawi, who ended this completely private space mission in the Atlantic Ocean after leaving the International Space Station about 12 hours earlier. Shortly after splashing down, SpaceX’s recovery ship went to retrieve the Freedom and its crew to transport them to the coast.
