Next Space Station Resupply Mission scheduled to launch from Wallops February 9

The next Northrup Grumman Antares launch to the International Space Station is scheduled for February 9 at the Wallops Flight Facility.  The scheduled lift off will be at 5:39 pm from pad 0A.  This will be the 13^th resupply mission to the ISS to launch from Wallops. This resupply mission will transport the following experiments to the space station .

The Mobile SpaceLab, a tissue and cell culturing facility that launches and returns on space station resupply spacecraft to offer researchers a quick-turnaround, high-throughput platform that can perform a biology experiment without the need for crew operations for as long as a month.

• Plant Habitat-02, which will cultivate radishes in the Advanced Plant Habitat facility as a model plant that is nutritious and edible. The ability to reliably grow nutritionally-valuable food crops in space which will be critical for NASA’s human exploration of the Moon and Mars.
• The Spacecraft Fire Experiment-IV (Saffire-IV) investigation, which will use the Cygnus resupply vehicle after it leaves the space station to examine the development and growth of a fire in different materials and environmental conditions. Understanding how fires spread in space is vital for developing flame-resistant materials and fire prevention measures.

Cargo resupply from U.S. companies ensures a national capability to deliver critical science research to the space station, significantly increasing NASA’s ability to conduct new investigations at the only laboratory in space.

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