Japanese Supply Craft Launched to Space Station

The launch took place from the Tanegashima Space Centre in the south-western prefecture of Kagoshima using a H-IIB launch vehicle, a revamped version of the H-IIA with which Japan entered the global satellite launch business.

A commercial Cygnus freighter owned by Orbital ATK is scheduled to launch from Cape Canaveral on December. 3 aboard a United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket.

On Sunday JAXA moved the launch to Wednesday. It’s carrying 4.5 tons of cargo, says JAXA, Japan’s space agency: Food, water, and other commodities for the astronauts, plus equipment for experiments, an electron telescope, and gear for the astronauts, like extra SAFER propulsion systems.

The launch on Wednesday will be the fifth mission of an HTV to the space station in low Earth orbit; four HTVs have flown to the Station to date. Besides the high-energy observatory the spacecraft was also carrying emergency supplies and an unmanned cargo vessel bound for the global Space Station (ISS). 30 and the launch time will be determined by the updated orbit of the ISS.

The Japanese Experiment Module Kibo laboratory and Exposed Facility are featured in this image photographed by a crew member on the global Space Station as the Space Shuttle Endeavour (STS-127) remains docked with the station.

Most meteors or “shooting stars” typically occur in the mesosphere at altitudes from 76 to 100 km.

S-CUBE hopes to be able to study clearly these meteors from both the northern and southern hemispheres with its onboard CCD camera.

So named because it apparently neither absorbs nor emits light, dark mater is impossible to observe directly with telescopes. The cubesats, called “Doves”, will eventually be deployed from the space station to fly freely.

The spacecraft itself has been modified from previous Kounotori missions to include two major upgrades to aid in its mission. KASPER stands for Advanced Space Environment Research.

A refrigerator-sized rack designed to host future small plug-and-play research payloads will also be transferred over to the space station from the HTV’s cargo compartment.

The Kounotori is expected to meet the ISS around 1100 GMT on Monday.

Once it has departed from the ISS, it will begin its journey back to Earth.