SpaceX cargo Dragon en route to ISS seen flying in sky daytime: Watch

SpaceX Dragon’s resupply services mission for NASA en route to International Space Station (ISS) was seen flying into orbital on Saturday morning, daytime. Sharing the footage, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) wrote on its official Twitter handle, “The SpaceX cargo Dragon flies into orbital daytime as it continues an approach to the Space Station for docking this morning.” The SpaceX Dragon was loaded with scientific experiments and other cargo. The spacecraft carried approximately 7,300-pound (3,300-kilogram) shipment, including fresh lemons, onions, avocados, and cherry tomatoes for the station's seven astronauts.

As the SpaceX rocket is journeying closer to ISS, it will fire its thrusters to move a safe distance from the station’s space-facing port of the Harmony module and will initiate a deorbit burn to begin its re-entry sequence into Earth’s atmosphere. Dragon is a US commercial cargo resupply spacecraft launched from Launch Complex 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. All previous arriving cargo Dragon spacecraft was captured and attached to the space station by astronauts operating the station’s robotic Canadarm2. On such cargo resupply mission delivered more than 6,400 pounds of hardware, research investigations, and crew supplies.

[A look inside the upgraded cargo Dragon spacecraft as time-sensitive payloads bound for the International Space Station
on SpaceX’s CRS-21 mission are loaded. Credit: SpaceX/NASA]

NASA sends 'micro-animals' 

Earlier,  NASA announced that it was launching SpaceX's cargo resupply mission to send the micro-animals which include 5,000 tardigrades dubbed as 'water bears’, 28 glow-in-the-dark baby squids, Tardigrades, Butterfly IQ Ultrasound and new solar panels into space. The microscopic creatures were being sent for astronauts to study “stress factors” that affect humans in space. NASA’s resupply mission carrying scientific research and technology will enable experiments aboard ISS including the study of how water bears tolerate space, whether microgravity affects symbiotic relationships, analyzing the formation of kidney stones, and more. 

Tardigrades [ tiny, just 0.04 inches or 1 millimeter long] are tiny bear-like creatures that tolerate environments more extreme than most life forms can. And therefore, these microorganisms will assist NASA in more research related to biological survival under extreme conditions in space. Scientists will study how different environmental conditions affect the tardigrade gene expression both on Earth and in Space. On 11 April 2019,  Israeli spacecraft Beresheet carrying these microbial creatures crashed into the moon. However, these life-forms survived the crash as they were stored in a dehydrated "tun" state and could be resuscitated later.