Streak and Plume from SpaceX Crew-2 Launch
Video Credit & Copyright:
Eric Holland
What's happening in the sky?
The pre-dawn sky first seemed relatively serene yesterday morning over
Indian Harbor Beach in
Florida,
USA.
But then it lit up with a
rocket launch.
Just to the north,
NASA's SpaceX Crew-2 Mission blasted into space aboard a powerful
Falcon 9 rocket.
The featured time-lapse video --
compressing 12-minutes into 8-seconds --
shows the bright launch plume starting on the far left.
The rocket rises into an increasingly thin
atmosphere,
causing its plume to spread out just as it is lit by the
rising Sun.
As the
Crew-2
capsule disappears over the horizon, the landing plume of the
returning first stage of the Falcon 9 descending toward the SpaceX
barge in the
Atlantic Ocean can be seen.
Up in space, the
Endeavour crew capsule
is expected to dock with the International Space Station
(ISS) this morning, delivering four astronauts.
The Crew-2 astronauts join
Expedition 65 to help conduct, among other tasks,
drug tests using
tissue chips -- small
microfluidic chips that simulate human organs --
that run rapidly in ISS's
microgravity.