WASHINGTON: A “next generation” US weather satellite that was rocketed into space from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida at 6:42 p.m. EST on Saturday (5.12 a.m. Sunday, India time) is on its way to sharpen forecasts, watches and warnings about hurricanes and storms, NASA said.

After the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite-R (GOES-R), reaches its final designated orbit in the next two weeks, it will be renamed GOES-16, the US space agency said in a statement.

“The launch of GOES-R represents a major step forward in terms of our ability to provide more timely and accurate information that is critical for life-saving weather forecasts and warnings,” said Thomas Zurbuchen, Associate Administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington.

“It also continues a decades-long partnership between NASA and NOAA to successfully build and launch geostationary environmental satellites,” Zurbuchen added.

The new satellite will become operational within a year, after undergoing a checkout and validation of its six new instruments, including the first operational lightning mapper in geostationary orbit.

“The next generation of weather satellites is finally here,” NOAA Administrator Kathryn Sullivan said.

Forecasters will use the lightning mapper to hone in on storms that represent the greatest threats. The satellite’s primary instrument, the Advanced Baseline Imager, will provide images of Earth’s weather, oceans and environment with 16 different spectral bands, including two visible channels, four near-infrared channels, and 10 infrared channels.

Improved space weather sensors on GOES-R will monitor the sun and relay crucial information to forecasters so they can issue space weather alerts and warnings.

In all, data from GOES-R will result in 34 new or improved meteorological, solar and space weather products, NASA said. </s> Image copyright ESA/NASA Image caption The ISS provides a unqiue perspective on Earth's weather

Thunderstorms are some of the most spectacular events in nature, yet what we can see from the surface of our planet is only the beginning.

There are bizarre goings on in Earth's upper atmosphere, and a new mission aims to learn more about them.

Launched to the International Space Station on Monday, the Atmosphere-Space Interactions Monitor (ASIM) will observe the strange electrical phenomena that occur above thunderstorms.

Sky lab

Orbiting at an altitude of just over 400km, the ISS provides the perfect view of Earth's turbulent weather systems.

ASIM will be deployed aboard the station later this month.

Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption A series of thunderstorms as seen from the ISS

The electrifying effects of storms are frequently observed from the space station.

Yet when lightning strikes downward, something very different is happening above the cloud tops.

Known as Transient Luminous Events (TLEs), these unusual features were first spotted by accident in 1989.

Minnesota professor John R Winckler was testing a television camera in advance of an upcoming rocket launch, when he realised that two frames showed bright columns of light above a distant storm cloud.

Image copyright OTD/LIS, NASA Marshall Space Flight Center Image caption Lightning strikes tend to concentrate over land masses

The discovery came as a shock to scientists at the time, according to Dr Torsten Neubert, ASIM's lead scientist.

"That really surprised all of us. How come this exists and we didn't know it? Airline pilots must have known about it - there are some anecdotal descriptions," the Technical University of Denmark physicist said.

For the better part of a century before TLEs were caught on camera, people who spotted them had been reporting "rocket lightning" or "upward lightning".

Now in need of names, the phenomena were christened sprites and elves because of their fleeting, mysterious nature.

Yet despite their diminutive monikers, these features are anything but small, and extend tens of kilometres into the atmosphere.

Sprites, elves and jets

So, what's causing these events?

"They are slightly different to lightning," Dr Neubert told BBC News. "It's a pulse of the electric field that travels up. For the sprite - when the atmosphere gets thin, the field can get a discharge."

Sprites appear milliseconds after a powerful cloud-to-ground lightning strike.

Elves, on the other hand, are caused by the electromagnetic pulse the strike produces. A brief, aurora-like expanding halo in the ionosphere, they occur too quickly to be spotted by the human eye and last less than a millisecond.

Although they are more elusive, "elves are incredibly well understood," says Dr Martin Fullekrug from the University of Bath.

They are the most common TLE, thought to occur twice as often as sprites.

Image copyright Jason Ahrns Image caption Sprites can last several milliseconds

Blue jets - upward electrical discharges from cloud tops - are the least well known.

"The jets are not very well studied because they're very faint. They're mainly blue. Also they're not necessarily associated with lightning. They pop up now and again and they're very mysterious," Dr Fullekrug added.

While elves are mainly spotted over warm ocean waters, sprites tend to occur over land.

North America, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and South Africa are all good places to see them.

Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption ESA astronaut Andreas Mogensen captured footage of rare blue jets from the ISS

But it is possible to spot sprites elsewhere.

A normal summer thunderstorm in the UK is about 10km wide. Sprites appear above mesoscale convective systems - storm complexes about 10 times larger.

"In Britain we also have [these storms] from time to time," explained Dr Fullekrug. "We're conducting research on one that happened in May last year. It produced a wonderful sequence of sprites [over Cornwall]."

The sprites were spotted by meteor observers, who had cameras trained on the sky to follow the trails of shooting stars.

Stormchasing from space

ASIM's main goals are to study the physics of TLEs, and the characteristics of thunderstorms that produce them.

The payload includes two cameras, which can capture 12 frames per second, plus X-ray and gamma ray detectors.

This will allow the international team of researchers, for many of whom this is the culmination of decades of work, to determine where in the cloud sprites or jets originate.

Image copyright Science Photo Library Image caption Sprites occur well above the cloud tops

With the aid of the European Space Agency, ASIM's minimum mission length is two years.

During this period, it is expected to observe a minimum of one TLE per day, although it is thought that they occur at least every minute, somewhere in the world.

For Dr Neubert, this will be an incredibly exciting time.

"We don't really know what's inside lightning. It happens so fast and it's so dangerous... it's hard to get to the real inside physics," he said.

In the thin upper atmosphere, TLEs are larger and easier to measure.

"To me," he added, "they represent a window to the inside of lightning." </s> Three days after successfully launching 10 communications satellites into orbit from the West Coast, Hawthorne-based SpaceX on Monday launched a cargo mission from the East Coast en route to the International Space Station.

The CRS-14 mission launched from Cape Canaveral at about 1:30 p.m. Pacific time.

SpaceX used a Dragon cargo-carrying spaceship for the mission — the same one it used during an April 2016 cargo flight to the space station. The Falcon 9 rocket that propelled the ship into space also was previously used, launching a space-station supply mission in August 2017.

Although SpaceX has made a habit of recovering its Falcon 9 rockets for reuse in future missions — reducing the cost of space flights by millions of dollars — the company did not attempt to recover the rocket from Monday’s launch.

The launch was the company’s seventh rocket flight this year and its 14th resupply launch to the space station since 2012 under a multibillion-dollar contract with NASA.

Included in the Dragon spaceship’s nearly three tons of cargo are several science experiments, including:
• An Atmosphere-Space Interactions Monitor, which will study severe thunderstorms and their impact on Earth’s atmosphere and climate.
• An experiment testing the effect of a no-gravity environment on the process of producing high-performance products from metal powders.

The spaceship is scheduled to arrive at the International Space Station on Wednesday. It will remain at the space station for about a month, before it returns to Earth with about 3,900 pounds of cargo, according to SpaceX.

SpaceX on Friday launched 10 Iridium communications satellites into orbit from Vandenberg Air Force Base. The satellites are part of what will ultimately be a 75-satellite array for Iridium’s “next-generation” communications system, which is expected to be in place this summer. </s> This photo provided by United Launch Alliance shows a United Launch Alliance (ULA) Atlas V rocket carrying GOES-R spacecraft for NASA and NOAA lifting off from Space Launch Complex-41 at 6:42 p.m. EST at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Fla., Saturday, Nov. 19, 2016. The most advanced weather satellite ever built rocketed into space Saturday night, part of an $11 billion effort to revolutionize forecasting and save lives.

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — The most advanced weather satellite ever built rocketed into space Saturday night, part of an $11 billion effort to revolutionize forecasting and save lives.

This new GOES-R spacecraft will track U.S. weather as never before: hurricanes, tornadoes, flooding, volcanic ash clouds, wildfires, lightning storms, even solar flares. Indeed, about 50 TV meteorologists from around the country converged on the launch site — including NBC's Al Roker — along with 8,000 space program workers and guests.

"What's so exciting is that we're going to be getting more data, more often, much more detailed, higher resolution," Roker said. In the case of tornadoes, "if we can give people another 10, 15, 20 minutes, we're talking about lives being saved."

Think superhero speed and accuracy for forecasting. Super high-definition TV, versus black-and-white.

"Really a quantum leap above any satellite NOAA has ever flown," said Stephen Volz, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's director of satellites.

"For the American public, that will mean faster, more accurate weather forecasts and warnings," Volz said earlier in the week. "That also will mean more lives saved and better environmental intelligence" for government officials responsible for hurricane and other evacuations.

Airline passengers also stand to benefit, as do rocket launch teams. Improved forecasting will help pilots avoid bad weather and help rocket scientists know when to call off a launch.

NASA declared success 3 1/2 hours after liftoff, following separation from the upper stage.

The first in a series of four high-tech satellites, GOES-R hitched a ride on an unmanned Atlas V rocket, delayed an hour by rocket and other problems. NOAA teamed up with NASA for the mission.

The satellite — valued by NOAA at $1 billion — is aiming for a 22,300-mile-high equatorial orbit. There, it will join three aging spacecraft with 40-year-old technology, and become known as GOES-16. After months of testing, this newest satellite will take over for one of the older ones. The second satellite in the series will follow in 2018. All told, the series should stretch to 2036.

GOES stands for Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite. The first was launched in 1975.

GOES-R's premier imager — one of six science instruments — will offer three times as many channels as the existing system, four times the resolution and five times the scan speed, said NOAA program director Greg Mandt. A similar imager is also flying on a Japanese weather satellite.

Typically, it will churn out full images of the Western Hemisphere every 15 minutes and the continental United States every five minutes. Specific storm regions will be updated every 30 seconds.

Forecasters will get pictures "like they've never seen before," Mandt promised.

A first-of-its-kind lightning mapper, meanwhile, will take 500 snapshots a second.

This next-generation GOES program — $11 billion in all — includes four satellites, an extensive land system of satellite dishes and other equipment, and new methods for crunching the massive, nonstop stream of expected data.

Hurricane Matthew, interestingly enough, delayed the launch by a couple weeks. As the hurricane bore down on Florida in early October, launch preps were put on hold. Matthew stayed far enough offshore to cause minimal damage to Cape Canaveral, despite some early forecasts that suggested a direct strike. </s> In the cargo hold is a UK-built satellite that will test different approaches to removing space junk from the Earth’s orbit, as well as an international science package to study powerful lightning from space.

Led by the University of Surrey, built by the world’s leading small satellite manufacturer Surrey Satellite Technology Limited, and with technology on board designed by Airbus, the RemoveDEBRIS mission will experiment with cost effective technologies that could be used to tackle the problem of space junk.

“Space debris is one of the key challenges we face and it’s great to see a British university and some of our innovative space companies leading the way on the search for solutions. It’s also a fantastic example of the unique expertise found in the UK’s growing space sector and the value that it adds to international projects.

“The UK Space Agency continues to work closely with industry to develop new technologies and infrastructure to grow our share of the global space market as part of the Government’s industrial strategy.”

The RemoveDEBRIS satellite will be deployed from the International Space Station and attempt to capture simulated space debris using a net and a harpoon, while also testing advanced cameras and radar systems. Once those experiments are complete, it will unfurl a drag sail to bring itself and the debris out of orbit, where it will burn up as it enters the Earth’s atmosphere.

The experiment is important as there are thousands of pieces of space debris circulating the planet – many travelling faster than a speeding bullet – posing a risk to valuable satellites and even the International Space Station itself.

Professor Guglielmo Aglietti, Director of the Surrey Space Centre at the University of Surrey, said:

“It is important to remember that a few significant collisions have already happened. Therefore, to maintain the safety of current and future space assets, the issue of the control and reduction of the space debris has to be addressed.

“We believe the technologies we will be demonstrating with RemoveDEBRIS could provide feasible answers to the space junk problem – answers that could be used on future space missions in the very near future.”

Also on board the SpaceX Dragon capsule is a science experiment known as the Atmosphere-Space Interactions Monitor (ASIM), which will study high-altitude lightning above severe thunder storms. Scientists are interested in these electrical discharges which can produce bright colours – sometimes called red sprites and blue jets – as they can alter the chemistry of the stratosphere and potentially affect the Earth’s climate. ASIM is travelling to the International Space Station in the trunk compartment of the Dragon capsule. Once it arrives, the station’s robotic arm will transfer the payload from the capsule to the external payload facility on the European Space Agency’s (ESA’s) Columbus module.

Dr Martin Fullekrug, the lead UK scientist on the project based at the University of Bath, said:

“I have been researching and investigating space and lightning events for over 15 years and the launch of ASIM feels like the pinnacle of my journey into understanding this phenomenon.

“This is the first time such a detailed and technologically-advanced measurement device will be flown into space to observe lightning and will hopefully provide us with new knowledge about how lightning is initiated and how the properties of lightning can affect our daily lives in so many different ways.”

The experiment, part funded by the UK Space Agency through our investment in ESA and built by the Danish company Terma, will be operated by ESA with involvement from scientists in the UK.

Dr Graham Turnock, Chief Executive of the UK Space Agency said:

“This experiment will give scientists all over the world the opportunity to study the effects of powerful lightning storms from the unique vantage point of the International Space Station. It’s another exciting moment for international space collaboration and commercial spaceflight, which the UK Space Agency supports through the Government’s Industrial Strategy.” </s> Major experiments that will look into a range of scientific disciplines from human health to atmospheric conditions on Earth are on their way to the International Space Station following liftoff at 9:39 a.m. EST aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. About 5,500 pounds of research equipment, cargo and supplies are packed into the SpaceX Dragon spacecraft that is now in Earth orbit and headed to the station on the CRS-10 mission.

SpaceX’s Dragon cargo craft launched from Launch Complex 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. This was the first commercial launch from Kennedy’s historic pad.

Astronauts Thomas Pesquet of ESA (European Space Agency) and Shane Kimbrough of NASA will use the space station’s robotic arm to capture Dragon when it arrives at the station. Live coverage of the rendezvous and capture will begin at 4:30 a.m. Wednesday, Feb. 22 on NASA TV and the agency’s website, with installation coverage set to begin at 8:30 a.m.

Research materials flying inside the Dragon’s pressurized area include a crystal growth experiment that will crystallize a monoclonal antibody that is undergoing clinical trials for the treatment of immunological diseases. Growing the crystal in space will allow it develop more than it could on Earth where gravity causes crystals to collapse on themselves. Preserving these antibodies in crystals allows researchers a glimpse into how the biological molecules are arranged, which can provide new information about how they work in the body. So far, Earth-grown crystalline suspensions of monoclonal antibodies have proven to be too low-quality to fully model.

Better defining how some bacteria become drug-resistant is the focus of another experiment that aims to develop medicines that counter the resistance. Stem cells like those used to treat strokes and other occurrences also will be studied using experiment supplies brought up on this flight.

The equipment aboard the Dragon includes a major instrument that will survey Earth’s upper atmosphere in a continuation of one of NASA’s longest-running Earth-observing programs. Called SAGE III for Stratospheric Aerosol and Gas Experiment, the instrument examines the levels of ozone, aerosols, nitrogen dioxide and water vapor in the stratosphere and troposphere high above Earth. It is the latest version of an experiment that began in 1979 and has created a multi-decade record of measurements. The 2,200-pound instrument will be connected to the outside of the station to make daily observations for several years.

The mission is the company’s tenth cargo flight to the station under NASA’s Commercial Resupply Services contract. Dragon’s cargo will support dozens of the more than 250 science and research investigations during the station’s Expeditions 50 and 51.

Dragon is scheduled to depart the space station in late March, returning nearly 5,000 pounds of science, hardware and crew supplies.

For more than 16 years, humans have lived and worked continuously aboard the International Space Station, advancing scientific knowledge and demonstrating new technologies, making research breakthroughs not possible on Earth that will enable long-duration human and robotic exploration into deep space. A global endeavor, more than 200 people from 18 countries have visited the unique microgravity laboratory that has hosted more than 1,900 research investigations from researchers in more than 95 countries. </s> It was dark on Earth when NASA’s Parker Solar Probe launched on its journey to endless day. The first spacecraft designed to swoop by a star took flight from Cape Canaveral, Florida, at 3:31 EDT Sunday morning. A roaring Delta IV Heavy rocket carried the probe out of Earth’s atmosphere. Next stop: A loop past Venus to rendezvous with the sun.

The source of all light and life on Earth is also the source of one of its biggest natural threats: space weather. The sun’s atmosphere regularly erupts with fast-moving flashes of protons and explosions of energetic particles that can hit Earth within minutes and disrupt radio communication, interfere with GPS, and fry the electric grid. A “worst-case scenario” space weather event could cause more damage than Hurricanes Katrina, Harvey and Sandy combined.

“It sounds like science fiction,” said National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration meteorologist William Murtagh, who heads the Space Weather Prediction Center. “But it’s something that’s not only possible but very likely to happen in the not-too-distant future.”

Scientists have long struggled to understand and predict space weather events, because the ferocious environment around the sun makes them difficult to witness as they form.

Murtagh and scores of other researchers watched as NASA’s newest spacecraft embarked on a mission that should take it closer to the sun than any human-made object has gone before.

The probe is the culmination of a half-century effort to understand our star, Murtagh says, and it may help us prepare for the hazards the sun may throw at us in the future.

Part of the sun erupted on Sept. 1, 1859. English astronomer Richard Carrington noticed a brilliant white solar flare on the sun, brighter than the sunspots he usually observed. Roughly a day later, a blast of charged particles – known as a coronal mass ejection, or CME – arrived at Earth, jostling the planet’s magnetic bubble. People as far south as Cuba saw the sky light up with auroras. Geomagnetic currents sent surges of electricity through copper telegraph wires, zapping operators and setting telegraph paper aflame.

If a similar event happened today, it would bring life as we know it to a halt.

The energetic particles within a coronal mass ejection can penetrate the walls of spacecraft and pose a radiation risk to astronauts and the technology they depend on. They can interfere with satellites, disrupting radio communication and GPS. And if a CME hits our planet’s magnetosphere at the right angle, it can generate powerful waves of electricity within the Earth. These may then infiltrate utility grids and blow out transformers that provide electricity – like tripping a circuit on a massive scale.

The sun exploded again in July 2012, spewing material toward Earth at nearly 6 million miles per hour. This time the coronal mass ejection hit a NASA spacecraft called STEREO-A at full-blast. The spacecraft’s sensors were stressed, but they still managed to measure the solar particles, gusts of solar wind and the strength of the interplanetary magnetic field.

A year after the explosion, in a paper published in the journal Space Weather, astrophysicists examined the STEREO-A data to answer a worst-case question. “What if that coronal mass ejection had occurred 10 days earlier, when the Earth was in the line of fire?” said Daniel Baker, a professor of planetary and space physics at the University of Colorado at Boulder and one of the authors of the study.

Their conclusion: If it had hit Earth, Baker and his colleagues wrote, there was a “very legitimate question of whether our society would still be ‘picking up the pieces.'”

In 2008, a National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine report on the economic and societal impacts of space weather came up with a worst-case estimate for an extreme geomagnetic storm: It could cost North America up to $2 trillion in the first year, and recovery would take four to 10 years.

It’s said that space weather science lags about 50 years behind terrestrial weather forecasting. Meteorologists know what conditions cause hurricanes, and they can spot the seeds of a storm brewing over the ocean long before it makes landfall.

But warning times for space weather events are often measured in minutes, Murtagh said, and there is too much we do not know.

“There’s a lack of understanding,” Murtagh said. “It’s science. It’s knowledge of the sun and the physical processes that are likely to produce those energetic particles. We just don’t fully understand the science yet.”

Much of our modern understanding of the sun stems from 91-year-old Eugene Parker, for whom NASA’s new probe is named.

In the mid-1950s, Parker discovered a link between two seemingly unrelated space mysteries. First, bizarrely, the corona, or atmosphere of the sun, is hotter than its surface – scientists liken the sun to a campfire that feels hotter the further one stands from the flames. And second, the dusty tails of comets always point away from the sun, as if blasted by a powerful wind.

Parker realized the corona is not a static halo, but a stream of material from the sun itself. It starts slow and dense and zooms up as it escapes the sun’s gravity, eventually exceeding the speed of sound. The pointed tails of comets behave like windsocks caught in the solar wind.

The acceleration of the particles in the solar wind remains one of the “fundamental mysteries of the sun,” said Nicola Fox, a heliophysicist at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory and the project scientist for Parker Solar Probe. And it is one of the keys to understanding CMEs – the blasts that pose so much danger to life on Earth.

After the National Academies released its sobering 2008 report, “awareness, both at government and in the public, for this hazard really came to the fore,” said a Federal Emergency Management Agency official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

Trillion-dollar space storms are a rare issue that rallies Republicans and Democrats alike. The Obama administration’s executive order 13744 created a national space weather policy in 2016. FEMA recently finished drafting a federal operations plan for space weather that was sent to the Trump administration for approval. Congress is also considering legislation directing funds toward developing a space weather plan.

The issue is particularly pressing for the East Coast of the United States between Washington and Maine, not only because of the extensive electric infrastructure in this region. The very ground beneath our feet makes us vulnerable, Murtagh said. The 300 million-year-old igneous rock on which the Eastern Seaboard is perched does not conduct electricity well. If a current strikes this rock, it will seek an easier path – like metal pipes, telephone wires and electric cables. Eventually, the current can hit high-voltage transformers, the spine of the power grid, and overwhelm their magnetic cores.

This is not idle speculation. It happened, on a relatively small scale, in Canada in 1989. The sun belched out a gas cloud in early March that cut off radio signals. (At first, some observers suspected Soviet, not solar, interference.) Electrical currents buzzed through the ground and flooded into the Hydro-Québec power plant. Six million people in Québec were without power for nine hours. Glancing effects were felt as far away as New Jersey, where the electrical surge roasted a transformer at the Salem Nuclear Power Plant.

Industry reports suggest operators would have enough time to shut down the grid before it suffered permanent damage. But others are not as optimistic.

“We’re not going to know until a real event happens whether or not that’s a true statement,” said the FEMA official, who added power utility engineers “won’t say this publicly,” but they have been stocking up on spare transformers where they can. Installing new transformers – which would have to be built overseas – might take one or two years.

That a future solar storm will blast Earth is not a question of if, but when. In 2012, Peter Riley, who studies the sun’s corona at Predictive Science Inc., a San Diego-based company that develops computer models of the sun, published an article in Space Weather that calculated the odds of a Carrington-scale repeat. Within the next decade, he concluded, it could be about 12 percent – on par with the risk of other 100-year hazards, like massive floods.

Over the next seven years, the Parker Solar Probe will embark on a series of 24 egg-shaped orbits around the sun, repeatedly swinging past Venus to reorient itself. Each close approach will shoot it through the corona at a breathtaking 450,000 miles per hour – fast enough to get from Washington to New York in about a second. With its dust detectors, particle counters, and a telescope that can take 3-D images of the corona, the probe will measure the sun’s electric and magnetic fields, scoop particles from the solar wind for sampling and watch as shocks travel out from the sun’s surface, through the atmosphere and into space.

“There’s no doubt in my mind that measurements from probe and our understanding is going to have a huge impact on our ability to predict space weather,” said Christina Cohen, a scientist at the California Institute of Technology’s Space Radiation Lab who studies energetic particles.

It is a project scientists have dreamed about for roughly as long as they have known about the solar wind. But it took half a century to develop the necessary technology. When the spacecraft makes its first close approach in November, a carbon-composite heat shield will be all that protects the minivan-sized Parker Solar Probe from the million-mile-wide ball of hot gas.

Parker was interviewed on NASA-TV shortly after witnessing the launch of the probe that bears his name. “All I can say is, wow, here we go,” he said. “We’re in for some learning over the next several years.” </s> The 11th dedicated cargo delivery mission by SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft NASA’s Kennedy Space Center will deliver nearly 6,000 pounds of equipment to the International Space Station.

The spacecraft is set for launch Saturday, June 3, and should reach the space station Monday, June 5. A Falcon 9 rocket will send the Dragon cargo carrier into orbit for the two-day transit to the research outpost.

SpaceX has launched 10 resupply missions to the space station to date, including one cargo capsule lost in a launch failure. One more Dragon spacecraft flew to the space station in May 2012 on a demonstration mission.

In addition to more than 3,700 pounds of cargo inside Dragon’s pressurized cabin, the spacecraft’s external trunk is packed with three unpressurized packages.

One of the instruments, NASA’s Neutron Star Interior Composition Explorer (NICER), will be mounted by the station’s robotic arm on ExPRESS Logistics Carrier 2, a platform on the space-facing side of the research lab’s starboard-side truss. NICER will study the super-dense remnants of supernova explosions, called neutron stars, and demonstrate how future missions could use pulsars for deep space navigation.

Another unpressurized payload is the Roll-Out Solar Array (ROSA) sponsored by the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory. The new solar array design could be used on future commercial satellites, making the power generators 20 percent lighter and able to fit into a launch package four times smaller than conventional fold-out solar panels.

A commercial Earth-imaging platform developed by Teledyne Brown is also stowed in Dragon’s trunk. The Multiple User System for Earth Sensing, or MUSES, can host high-definition and hyperspectral cameras for Earth-viewing.

NASA has provided a breakdown of the cargo manifest listed below. </s> China’s defunct space lab could hurtle back to Earth later than previously forecast, with the European Space Agency saying it may re-enter the atmosphere as late as Monday morning GMT.

The ESA, which is tracking the craft, had earlier given a window of between midday on Saturday and early Sunday afternoon GMT.

Chinese authorities have said the roughly eight-tonne Tiangong-1 is unlikely to cause any damage when it comes down and that its fiery disintegration will offer a “splendid” show akin to a meteor shower.

The abandoned craft is expected to make its plunge between the afternoon of Sunday and early Monday morning GMT, the ESA said in a blog post announcing its revised forecast.

In its update today the agency said calmer space weather was now expected as a high-speed stream of solar particles did not cause an increase in the density of the upper atmosphere, as previously expected.

Such an increase in density would have pulled the spacecraft down sooner, it said.

The re-entry window remains “highly variable”, the ESA cautioned. There is similar uncertainty about where debris from the lab could land.

But there is “no need for people to worry”, the China Manned Space Engineering Office (CMSEO) said earlier on its WeChat social media account.

Such falling spacecraft do “not crash into the Earth fiercely like in sci-fi movies, but turn into a splendid (meteor shower) and move across the beautiful starry sky as they race towards the Earth”, it said.

Tiangong-1 -- or “Heavenly Palace” -- was placed in orbit in September 2011 and had been slated for a controlled re-entry, but it ceased functioning in March 2016 and space enthusiasts have been bracing for its fiery return since.

The ESA said the lab will make an “uncontrolled re-entry” as ground teams are no longer able to fire its engines or thrusters for orbital adjustments.

A Chinese spaceflight engineer, however, denied earlier this year that it was out of control.

China will step up efforts to coordinate with the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs as the re-entry nears, foreign ministry spokesman Lu Kang told reporters on Friday.

Read more: China says Earth-bound space lab to offer splendid show like meteor shower

Beijing sees its multi-billion-dollar space programme as a symbol of the country’s rise. It plans to send a manned mission to the moon in the future.

China sent another lab, Tiangong-2, into orbit in September 2016 as a stepping stone to its goal of having a crewed space station by 2022.

During the re-entry, atmospheric drag will rip away solar arrays, antennas and other external components at an altitude of around 100 kilometres (60 miles), according to the Chinese space office.

The intensifying heat and friction will cause the main structure to burn or blow up, and it should disintegrate at an altitude of around 80 kilometres, it said.

Most fragments will dissipate in the air and a small amount of debris will fall relatively slowly before landing across hundreds of square kilometres, most likely in the ocean, which covers more than 70 per cent of the Earth’s surface.

Experts have downplayed any concerns about the Tiangong-1 causing any damage when it hurtles back to Earth, with the ESA noting that nearly 6,000 uncontrolled re-entries of large objects have occurred over the past 60 years without harming anyone.

Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, estimates that Tiangong-1 is the 50th most massive uncontrolled re-entry of an object since 1957, when the Soviet Union launched Sputnik 1 -- the world’s first artificial satellite.

At an altitude of 60-70 kilometres, debris will begin to turn into “a series of fireballs”, which is when people on the ground will “see a spectacular show”, he said.
The Atmosphere-Space Interactions Monitor launches to the International Space Station to monitor and research thunderstorms.