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A SpaceX cargo capsule is set to head back toward Earth this morning (Dec. 6), and you can watch the action live.
A robotic Dragon freighter will undock from the International Space Station’s (ISS) Harmony module today at 11:05 a.m. EST (1605 GMT), if all goes according to plan.
NASA will stream the departure live, beginning at 10:50 a.m. EST (1550 GMT). Space.com will carry the feed as well, if the agency makes it available.
This Dragon is flying SpaceX’s 31st contracted ISS resupply mission for NASA, which explains the flight’s name: CRS-31. The capsule delivered about 6,000 pounds (2,700 kilograms) of food, equipment and scientific experiments to the station on Nov. 5.
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Dragon will carry cargo down from the ISS today as well — “thousands of pounds of supplies and scientific experiments designed to take advantage of the space station’s microgravity environment,” NASA officials wrote in a CRS-31 undocking preview.
Dragon is the only operational ISS freighter that can do such two-way deliveries. The others — Northop Grumman’s Cygnus spacecraft and Russia’s Progress vehicle — burn up in Earth’s atmosphere when their cargo missions are done.
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The CRS-31 Dragon is expected to splash down off the coast of Florida on Saturday (Dec. 7), enabling “quick transportation of the experiments to NASA’s Space Systems Processing Facility at Kennedy Space Center,” as agency officials wrote in the update.
NASA will not livestream Dragon’s splashdown, but rather give updates via its ISS blog.
