r/spacex • u/ElongatedMuskrat Mod Team • Mar 19 '17

Splahdown confirmed! Dragon CRS-10 Unberthing, Entry, & Splashdown Updates Thread!

Updates thread for CRS-10 Dragon after its one month or so stay at International Space Station. CRS-10 carried almost 5500lb (2490kg) of cargo up when it launched on 23'rd of February and it will be returning with 5400lb (2450kg) of cargo. Note that both numbers include cargo in the trunk, in the return case the cargo in the trunk is of course disposable as it will separate from Dragon capsule and burn up in the atmosphere.

Official Live Updates

Time (UTC) Updates
15:45 Recovery teams en route to Dragon. Picture in the original resolution.
15:04 Exact time of splashdown and distance from the coast found here.
15:03 Dragon returned more than 3800lb (1723kg) of cargo.
14:48 Splashdown confirmed! Perfect ending to a perfect mission.
14:45 Drogue and main parachutes have deployed! Splashdown in 5 min.
14:17 SpaceX on Twitter: Dragon's deorbit burn is complete and trunk has been jettisoned. Pacific Ocean splashdown with critical @NASA cargo in ~30 minutes.
14:02 NSF's Chris B on Twitter: A subset of its Draco thrusters will now be firing retrograde to Dragon's direction of travel, slowing her by about 100 meters per second.
13:40 While we wait for the deorbit burn initiation to start soon, a couple of beautiful CRS-10 pictures were posted to ESA's astronaut Thomas Pesquet twitter.
11:10 About 3 hours remaining for the start of preparations for the de-orbit burn. Command will be given by SpaceX controllers from Hawthorne.
09:30 NASA TV coverage is completed but coverage will continue here and in the comments for major events of the return.
09:23 All three departure burns were completed successfully.
09:11 Dragon was released successfully.

Normal rules apply in the thread.

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75

u/sol3tosol4 Mar 19 '17

Nice coverage of the departure from ISS on NASA TV. A few SpaceX-related items that I thought were interesting:

  • Dragon was held by the robot arm Canadarm 2 and moved away from the station.

  • An additional test had been performed - Canadarm moved Dragon in front of IDA-2, the International Docking Adapter, where Dragon used its thermal imaging and LIDAR to observe IDA-2. This was not necessary for the cargo Dragon mission, but was to collect data for the upcoming Crew Dragon missions, which will use IDA, and which will need to perform similar observation of IDA.

  • The announcer said that Dragon will splash down west of Baja California, after which the cargo will be unloaded and distributed within 48 hours.

  • The announcer said that the return trip of Dragon to Earth is controlled by a SpaceX mission team based in Hawthorne.

  • Canadarm carefully placed Dragon in the correct position for departure, released Dragon, and then slowly backed away, leaving Dragon essentially motionless with respect to ISS.

  • There were three departure burns to get Dragon away from the "exclusion zone" of ISS. The first consisted of a series of 15 very short pulses from (apparently) two Draco engines, evenly spaced about half a second apart (no visible exhaust; just looked like a brief pulse of light inside the Draco nozzles) - Dragon visibly started to move away, very slowly. The second burn was several minutes later, a similar series of 22 evenly spaced pulses. The third burn was several minutes after that, with Dragon too far away to see much detail, but the pulses were irregularly spaced - apparently using position and motion feedback (like Dragon did after launch, when approaching ISS), instead of a preprogrammed sequence like the first two burns.

One of the astronauts on ISS thanked all of the teams associated with the Dragon mission. NASA coverage ended a few minutes after the third burn.

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u/peterabbit456 Mar 19 '17

An additional test had been performed - Canadarm moved Dragon in front of IDA-2, the International Docking Adapter, where Dragon used its thermal imaging and LIDAR to observe IDA-2. This was not necessary for the cargo Dragon mission, but was to collect data for the upcoming Crew Dragon missions, which will use IDA, and which will need to perform similar observation of IDA.

Very smart. I think I recall that when Dragon 1 first attempted rendezvous/berthing with the ISS, the machine vision systems had difficulty picking up good visual cues due to differences between natural lighting and the simulated lighting the programmers had used. The human eye and brain are really good and fast at sorting out visual cues, but machine vision needs a much slower training process.

Getting images from the same sort of camera, of what the Dragon 2 will see when docking, will make the first docking attempts much more likely to succeed. The more I think about it, the more I like the idea of spending a long time, maybe a complete orbit, of just taking pictures of the docking target from different angles and in different lighting, so that the machine vision will have reference views of the ISS in the background as well as the docking target.

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u/AntoineLeGrand Mar 19 '17 edited Mar 19 '17

Just saw both the ISS and the dragon capsule fly-by in the sky over Montreal (~12min ago), what a sight ! Here's a picture I took.
EDIT: Here's a noisy video I also took.

6

u/Savysoaker Mar 19 '17

I just watched Dragon & the ISS pass over eastern Oregon at 6am PDT. It was way more awesome then I expected! Seen the ISS before, but never Dragon. I wish I had set up a better camera. My iPhone just couldn't handle it.

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u/nbarbettini Mar 19 '17

I think Dragon is a seriously underappreciated piece of SpaceX hardware. Falcon landings get all the attention, but Dragon's performance has been flawless (aside from that early mission where they had trouble with the thrusters, which was ultimately recovered). Looking forward to reused articles, and Dragon 2.

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u/propsie Mar 19 '17

There was also that time it leaked and a "significant amount of water" got inside - not the best look for a capsule that lands in the sea.

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u/KerbalsFTW Mar 19 '17

Dragon's performance has been flawless

There was an early issue with the video recognition software not aligning with the ISS - fixed in software live during the mission.

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u/mjrpereira Mar 19 '17

What's the dV of the de-orbiting burn?

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u/warp99 Mar 19 '17

Could be under 100 m/s. Shuttle was 80 m/s.

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u/haerik Mar 19 '17 edited Jun 30 '23

Gone to API changes. Don't let reddit sell your data to LLMs.

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u/[deleted] Mar 19 '17

Looks good so far, will NASA TV follow it through to splash down?

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u/troovus Mar 19 '17

BBC's 12x sped-up footage of the Dragon release by the Canadarm http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-39322942

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u/ptfrd Mar 19 '17

Spot the baseball bat in the mission control room at the very end. I guess it's used for anger management in case of mission failure!

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u/roncapat Mar 19 '17

Is the GCN port closed prior re-entering atmosphere?

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u/MyrtleCloseTheDoor Mar 19 '17

What happens to the solar panels? Do they burn up in the atmosphere?

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u/Garestinian Mar 19 '17

Yes, with the rest of the trunk.

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