Orbital ATK will launch an Antares rocket to the International Space Station tomorrow morning
Early risers on the US East Coast might get a bit of a show tomorrow morning: private space company Orbital ATK will launch its Antares rocket with a Cygnus spacecraft at 4:39 AM EDT from NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia.
The mission is the company’s ninth flight for NASA, and is headed to the International Space Station, where it will drop off a 7,400 pounds of scientific equipment and supplies when it docks on Thursday, May 24th.
One piece of equipment that the rocket will carry is the Cold Atom Laboratory, which will use magnetic fields and lasers to create clouds of atoms called Bose-Einstein condensates (BECs), cooled to just above absolute zero. On Earth, those BECs are dragged down by gravity, limiting the amount of...