The 5,500 pounds of supplies inside the SpaceX Dragon spacecraft includes a wide variety of experiment equipment that astronauts on the International Space Station will operate during Expeditions 50 and 51. The research will cover plant growth, crystallization of a potential immunological disease treatment and a major Earth observation instrument called SAGE III.
The APEX-4, or Advanced Plant EXperiments, is seen here being prepared in a cold room in the Kennedy Space Center Processing Facility. The research involves Arabidopsis in petri plates inside the Veggie facility aboard the International Space Station. Since Arabidopsis is the genetic model of the plant world, it is a perfect sample organism for performing genetic studies in spaceflight. Photos by NASA/Bill White