Fantastic fly-by

As promised, I stayed up to watch the Dragon capsule pass the Space Station within one and a half miles. Awesome.

The events of the last few hours are all on this NASA graphic: (all images are screen captures from NASA TV):

 

The early morning events all happened on the green line across the bottom. Dragon executed two burns, one near the red arrow and one after the curved part, to put it on an orbit 2.5 km below ISS. Then Dragon's relatively higher speed (lower orbit = higher orbital velocity) allowed it to pass by ISS without further maneuvers.


Here was the camera view when astronaut Andre Kuipers first reported seeing Dragon. Can you see it?

Slowly, very slowly, the craft advanced under ISS. Here, looking nearly straight down, Dragon is seen as it and ISS cross the coast of South Africa--the country of origin of SpaceX's founder Elon Musk.

As the craft approached nadir (or "rbar crossing" in NASA-speak), you could finally make out details of Dragon--at least the fact that it's not just a dot:

 Good thing that I caught that one: just a moment later, ISS and Dragon passed into the Earth's shadow ("eclipse") and the capsule was no longer visible.

Congratulations to SpaceX and NASA on yet another milestone in this brilliant flight. By tomorrow, when Dragon has actually BERTHED at ISS, this fly-by will be a dim memory--but for now, it's amazing.