Jane Edwards
Northrop Grumman intends to launch on Friday, Nov. 16 its Cygnus spacecraft to deliver approximately 7.4K pounds of scientific equipment and crew supplies to the International Space Station.
The scheduled liftoff of Cygnus from NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia atop Northrop’s Antares rocket will mark the company’s 10th cargo resupply mission to ISS, the firm said Wednesday.
The spacecraft dubbed “S.S. John Youngâ€Â is set to reach ISS on Sunday, Nov. 18, and dock for a couple of months with the orbiting laboratory before it leaves with up to 7.4K pounds of disposable cargo and re-enters Earth following the conclusion of secondary missions.
The NG-10 mission will carry a science experiment that aims to assess self-healing materials in microgravity and designed by a team of high school students as part of Higher Orbits’ Go For Launch! initiative; a Slingshot CubeSat Deployer System; and three CubeSats that will be fielded through the NanoRacks External Cygnus Deployment Program.
One of the CubeSats is MYSat-1, which Khalifa University developed through the Space Systems and Technology Concentration program in partnership with Northrop and United Arab Emirates-based Al Yah Satellite Communications.
NASA announced in October that Northrop was targeting the NG-10 mission launch no earlier than Nov. 15.
