NASA TV
The spaceship undocked from the International Space Station and maneuvered to a different port.
It s the first time Crew Dragon has conducted this port relocation, but likely won t be the last.
SpaceX s first full astronaut crew successfully maneuvered its Crew Dragon spaceship to a new port on the International Space Station on Monday. It was the first time the vehicle had attempted the maneuver.
Called a port relocation, the process required the spaceship to back away from the ISS port where it had been since it arrived at the orbiting laboratory in November, then fly to a different, space-facing port, and dock there instead. Russian Soyuz vehicles have conducted port-relocation maneuvers 15 times in the past, but no astronauts had ever done it in a commercial spacecraft before.
All planetary systems have this point, called a barycenter, where their mass is perfectly balanced.
For some systems like Pluto and its moon, Charon the barycenter is outside the planet.
The moon orbits Earth right? The answer is actually a little more complicated than that.
The moon is circling a point about 3,000 miles from our planet s center, just below its surface. Earth is wobbling around that point, too, making its own circles.
That spot is the Earth-moon system s center of mass, known as the barycenter. It s the point of an object (or system of them) at which it can be balanced perfectly, with the mass distributed evenly on all sides.