HONG KONG: The International Space Station has been having a belated Christmas in recent weeks due to a delivery of various science payloads brought on by SpaceX’s Dragon cargo spacecraft, featuring a laser-firing instrument and a set of fruit flies and planarian flatworms.
NASA’s Cloud Aerosol Transport System (CATS) instrument arrived at the Station’s orbiting lab on Jan. 12 inside of the Dragon cargo capsule, which launched atop the Falcon 9 rocket by commercial spaceflight company SpaceX (officially known as Space Exploration Technologies Corp.).
“CATS will collect data about clouds, volcanic ash plumes and tiny airborne particles that can help improve our understanding of aerosol and cloud interactions and improve the accuracy of climate change models,” reported NASA officials in a recent statement.
Space.com reports that operators on the ground used a NASA-controlled robotic arm on the station to remove CATS from Dragon before passing the experiment off to a Japanese-controlled arm on Jan. 22, successfully attaching a NASA laser-firing instrument to the Station’s exterior.
“The Japanese-controlled arm installed the instrument to the Space Station’s Japanese Experiment Module, making CATS the first NASA-developed payload to fly on the Japanese module,” reported NASA, stating that the maneuver marked “the first time one robotic arm on station has worked in concert with a second robotic arm.”
In addition to CATS, Dragon also carried up a set of fruit flies and planarian flatworms, which can rebuild their organs and nervous systems when damaged. These organisms will be part of an experiment to better understand how the human body fights infections, with a focus on gravity’s influence on the growth of tissues.
“We use all of those as information to help us understand how living organisms work in general, and how humans work in particular,” said Julie Robinson, NASA’s ISS program chief scientist.
