We Are Part of the ISS!

We launched at 12:52 PM on Sunday, July 13th, and our spacecraft spent the next two days catching up with the International Space Station.  Early on the morning of July 15th, after circling the Earth over 40 times in a journey of over a million miles, Cygnus arrived at the International Space Station.

At 6:36 AM on Wednesday, July 16th, 260 miles above Libya, astronaut Steve Swanson reached out with the stations robotic arm and grabbed our spacecraft.  Next, astronauts used the station’s robotic arm to slowly moved the capsule into a docking port on the Earth Facing side of the ISS.  At 8:53 AM, our spacecraft was bolted into place and docking was complete.  Take a look at the photos below (credit:  NASA TV).

Would you like to see the station with your own eyes?  You can often view it just after sunset or just before sunrise.  Use this NASA website to find opportunities near you.

NCESSE’s SSEP on-orbit educational research opportunity is enabled through NanoRacks, LLC, which is working in partnership with NASA under a Space Act Agreement as part of the utilization of the International Space Station as a National Laboratory.