Bad Astronomy

Timeline for the fall of the Dragon

Tomorrow morning, Thursday May 31, the SpaceX Dragon capsule will undock from the International Space Station, perform a series of maneuvers, and then come back home to Earth. Over at The Planetary Society Blog, Jason Davis has a great writeup giving the times of the key events.

The preliminary stuff happens in the middle of the night for me in Colorado, but the actual descent to Earth happens at a much more palatable time. At 14:51 UTC (10:51 a.m. Eastern US time) the Dragon will begin the deorbit burn, dropping it lower in orbit. Less than an hour later, at 15:44 UTC it is scheduled to splash down in the Pacific ocean about 900 km (540 miles) off the coast of Los Angeles in California.

This will all be covered by various live webstreams, including NASA TV. I’ll be on Twitter as early as I can and I’ll update this post with more video streams as I hear of them.

Related Posts:

- SpaceX Dragon on its way to the ISS!
- Dragon is approaching the space station – UPDATED: CAPTURED!
- When a Dragon mated the space station
- Dragon hunting above, dragon hunting below