It brings the total missions for SpaceX to nine and allows NASA to maintain an uninterrupted US capability for human access to the space station.
As part of the missions, SpaceX’s Crew Dragon spacecraft and Falcon 9 rocket transport up to four astronauts along with critical cargo to the space station.
Earlier, SpaceX was contracted to fly three more missions to the ISS: Crew-4 and Crew-5 in 2022 and Crew-6 in 2023.
With the extension, which is “fixed-price, indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity,” NASA said in a statement.
It’s critical we begin to secure additional flights to the space station now, so we are ready as these missions are needed to maintain a US presence on the station, a Kathy Leaders, associate administrator of NASA’s Space Operations Mission Directorate, said in the agency’s notice of intent to modify SpaceX’s contract, published in December 2021.
“Our US human launch capability is essential to our continued safe operations in orbit and to building our low-Earth orbit economy,” Leaders added.
In 2014, NASA had awarded the CCAP contracts to Boeing and SpaceX through a public-private partnership as part of the agency’s Commercial Crew Program.
Under CCAP, NASA certifies that a provider’s space transportation system meets the agency’s requirements prior to flying missions with astronauts.
Only SpaceX was certified by NASA for crew transportation in November 2020, and the company is currently on its third crew rotation mission for the agency.
NASA has unveiled first images captured by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) which represents early stages of the telescope’s 18 main mirror segments properly aligning.
This star was chosen specifically because it is easily identifiable and not crowded by other stars of similar brightness, which helps to reduce background confusion, the US space agency said in a statement late on Friday.
Each dot within the mosaic is labeled by the corresponding primary mirror segment that captured it.
What looks like a simple image of blurry starlight now becomes the foundation to align and focus the telescope in order for Webb to deliver unprecedented views of the universe this summer.
Over the next month or so, the team will gradually adjust the mirror segments until the 18 images become a single star, said NASA.
“The entire Webb team is ecstatic at how well the first steps of taking images and aligning the telescope are proceeding. We were so happy to see that light makes its way into Hiram,” said Marcia Rieke, principal investigator for the Hiram instrument and regent's professor of astronomy, University of Arizona.
During the image capturing process that began February 2, Webb was repointed to 156 different positions around the predicted location of the star and generated 1,560 images using Hiram’s 10 detectors, amounting to 54 gigabytes of raw data.
The entire process lasted nearly 25 hours, but noted the observatory was able to locate the target star in each of its mirror segments within the first six hours and 16 exposures.
These images were then stitched together to produce a single, large mosaic that captures the signature of each primary mirror segment in one frame.
“This initial search covered an area about the size of the full Moon because the segment dots could potentially have been that spread out on the sky,” said Marshall Perry, deputy telescope scientist for Webb.
Moving forward, Webb’s images will only become clearer, more detail-laden, and more intricate.
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