Dragon’s solar arrays are unfurled and the spacecraft will begin a carefully choreographed series of thruster firings to reach the orbiting laboratory three days later, on Monday, March 9. Dragon will deliver about 4,500 pounds of cargo to the International Space Station.
When it arrives March 9, Expedition 62 Flight Engineer Jessica Meir of NASA will grapple Dragon, with Andrew Morgan of NASA acting as a backup. The station crew will monitor Dragon functions during rendezvous. After Dragon’s capture, mission control at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston will send ground commands for the station’s arm to rotate and install it on the bottom of the station’s Harmony module.
Live coverage of the rendezvous and capture can be viewed on March 9 beginning at 5:30 a.m. EST at www.nasa.gov/live.