SpaceX's 30th Dragon robotic cargo ship has returned to its home on Earth.
The Dragon spacecraft departed the International Space Station (ISS) today (April 28) at 1:10 PM EDT (1710 GMT), while both spacecraft were flying over Thailand. It was tropical night in that area, so there were no good photos of the docking moment.
Dragon returned to Earth after landing in the ocean off the coast of Florida around 2:30 a.m. EDT (0630 GMT) on Tuesday (April 30), SpaceX confirmed in its report. Share on X.
Related: SpaceX launches the 30th Dragon cargo mission to the International Space Station (video)
The current Dragon mission is known as CRS-30, because it is the 30th mission that SpaceX has sent to the International Space Station under a commercial resupply services contract with NASA.
The CRS-30 launch began on March 21 aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. The capsule docked with the orbiting laboratory on March 23, delivering approximately 3 tons of scientific instruments and supplies to the orbiting laboratory.
The pod tows cargo on the downward side as well — “over 4,100 lbs [1,860 kilograms] “From supplies and science experiments designed to take advantage of the space station's microgravity environment,” NASA officials wrote in an article Updated on Friday (April 26).
“Launching off the coast of Florida allows for rapid transportation of experiments to NASA's Space Systems Processing Facility at Kennedy Space Center in Florida, allowing researchers to collect data with minimal exposure of the sample to Earth's gravity,” they added.
Dragon is the only cargo vehicle capable of bringing equipment home safely from the International Space Station. The other two currently operational cargo spacecraft, Russia's Progress spacecraft and Northrop Grumman's Cygnus spacecraft, burn up in Earth's atmosphere upon completion of their work in orbit.
There's still a SpaceX spacecraft docked with the ISS, even after the separation of CRS-30, the Dragon vehicle flying on the company's Crew-8 astronaut mission for NASA.
Crew-8 launched on March 3, sending NASA astronauts Matthew Dominick, Michael Barratt, Janet Epps and Alexander Grebenkin of the Russian space agency Roscosmos to the International Space Station for a six-month stay.
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