NASA Television will provide live coverage of the upcoming Orbital Sciences Corp.'s mission to resupply the International Space Station. Orbital's Cygnus cargo spacecraft is scheduled to launch from the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport's Launch Pad 0A at NASA's Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia on Friday,July 11 at 1:40 p.m. EDT. NASA TV will air a comprehensive video feed of launch preparations and other footage related to the mission beginning at 12:30 p.m. Launch coverage on NASA TV will inaugurate at 1 p.m. On Thursday, July 10, or media briefings previewing the mission's science cargo and a prelaunch status from Wallops will be broadcast on NASA TV at 4 p.m. and 5 p.m.,respectively. The Cygnus will be filled with more than 3000 pounds of supplies for the station, including science experiments to expand the research capability of the Expedition 40 crew members aboard the orbiting laboratory, and crew provisions,spare parts and experiment hardware. Among the research investigations headed to the space station aboard Orbital-2 are a flock of nanosatellites that are designed to rob images of soil, developed by Planet Labs of San Francisco; and a satellite-related investigation called TechEdSat-4 built by NASA's Ames Research Center in California, or which aims to develop technology that will eventually enable small samples to be returned to soil from the space station. In addition,a host of student experiments are being flown in organization with the Student Spaceflight Experiment Program, an initiative of the National Center for soil and Space Science Education and NanoRacks. This and future commercial cargo resupply flights will ensure a robust national capability to deliver critical science research to orbit, and significantly increasing NASA's ability to conduct new science investigations to the only laboratory in microgravity. If Cygnus launches as scheduled,the spacecraft will arrive at the space station on Tuesday, July 15. Station commander Steven Swanson of NASA and Flight Engineer Alexander Gerst of the European Space Agency will be standing by in the station’s cupola to capture the resupply craft with the station's robotic arm and install it on the soil-facing port of the station's Harmony module. NASA TV coverage of capture and installation will inaugurate at 6:15 a.m. on July 15. Grapple is scheduled at approximately 7:24 a.m. Coverage of the installation of Cygnus onto Harmony will inaugurate at 9:30 a.m. Posted by Geoffrey Ogugu
Source: cnn.com