Dragon obeys its master

This morning's planned berthing of Dragon at the Space Station began with testing the ability of the Station crew to be in control: sending abort and hold commands. Prior to this, all commands had come from the SpaceX mission control center in Hawthorne, California.

Like yesterday's fly-by, today's flight began at 2.5 kilometers below Station. The distance was reduced to 1.4 km, then to 800 meters. Interestingly, the crew did not seem to acquire Dragon visually until it was within a kilometer, as opposed to yesterday when it was sighted several kilometers away. Here was the first image shown on NASA TV, several hundred meters away:

While the ISS cameras and crew were looking down on Dragon, it was looking back up with its thermal imager:

 

A safety zone of 250 meters (one WalMart) was maintained around ISS, shown here in NASA's ISS Mission Control:

 Dragon approached to 250m and held while awaiting approval to go ahead with the abort test. When passing into Earth nighttime over the Southern Ocean, the vehicle looked very bright by contrast at that range:

 If you use your imagination, you might be able to see the plumes from Dragon's thrusters firing. The plumes were actually quite clear on the video image, but were too short to capture reliably.

At about 2:30 AM Pacific time, Dragon and ISS passed over us here in Los Angeles--but it was cloudy.

The camera on ISS's robotic arm was getting good images, which is important since the arm will be capturing Dragon later today:

Once in the sunlight, the abort test proceeded, with astronaut Andre Kuipers sending the abort command when range had decreased from 250m to 235m. That small change in distance wasn't discernable visibly, but you could imagine it:

The abort test and hold test both went flawlessly. The sands of Morocco provide a nice backdrop:

At this moment, Dragon is holding at 235m while NASA evaluates some sensor data. The report just came in that all sensor data met expectations, so we can expect the capture and berthing to proceed.

By the way, here's a detailed explanatory video of the actual berthing mechanical operations. Thanks to friend and classmate Dan Nelson for the link.