Like Matt Damon in The Martian, NASA is getting ready to science the @$!# out of the International Space Station. Late on Tuesday night, pending last-minute weather or technical issues, a spacecraft named for the late space shuttle Columbia commander Rick Husband will launch from Kennedy Space Center. Liftoff of the science-laden spacecraft is set for 11:05pm EDT (3:05am GMT Wednesday).

The launch of the Orbital ATK spacecraft is NASA’s second resupply mission to the International Space Station after two critical supply ship failures: an Orbital launch in late 2014, and a SpaceX flight in June 2015. After NASA’s commercial fleet was grounded for half a year, the space agency is now trying to settle into a more regular resupply schedule. The first SpaceX resupply flight since its accident is scheduled for April 8.

A variety of scientific payloads highlight Tuesday’s launch. Among its 3.5-ton cargo of food, water and other supplies, the S.S. Rick Husband will ferry 777kg of scientific experiments into space, including an upgraded version of a 3D printer, gecko-like grippers for moving around in microgravity, the first component of an ambitious Spacecraft Fire Experiment, and an experiment to that will allow scientists to better understand the behavior of regolith on asteroids and other small bodies with near-zero gravity.

The latter experiment, Strata-1, will analyze four tubes filled with four different simulants of regolith, the soil on asteroids, comets, and other airless worlds created by untold number of impacts. Because of the microgravity environment, this soil is only very loosely bound to asteroids.

“The concern we have for interacting with these small bodies is that we actually don’t know quite what to expect,” said Marc Fries, principal investigator for Strata-1 at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, during a teleconference. “Sinking in is not so much the concern as scattering. Some asteroids are large rocks, and some are rubble piles. We don’t know the extent of hazards an astronaut would face in going up to an asteroid.”

For example, if an astronaut attempts to anchor to an asteroid, will the anchor hold? NASA has two robotic forays planned to asteroids, the OSIRIS-REx and Asteroid Retrieval missions, and humans will eventually visit asteroids near Earth. To better understand their surfaces, scientists will closely study the behavior of these simulated regoliths in microgravity over the next year to validate their computer models of regolith behavior on small, airless worlds.

A second 3D printer, known as the Additive Manufacturing Facility, will also ship to the space station. Twice as large as the original space printer, it will print 10 times faster from a stock of three different polymers instead of just one. Owned by Made in Space, NASA and other customers will pay to use the printer. “We have a queue of prints we’ve lined up from NASA and educational users,” said Matt Napoli, an official with the company.

Napoli cited uses as varied as research, crew tools, and printing materials in microgravity that cannot be done on Earth. Crew time to operate the printer will be minimal. Using its onboard camera and sensors, the company plans to remotely operate the machine from its Mountain View, California-based offices. After a print is complete, all an astronaut will have to do is float over, remove a part, and close the machine’s door.

The space station, with a habitable volume of 425 cubic meters, serves three primary purposes for NASA, and the experiments launching Tuesday night fulfill all of those mandates. Foremost, the station presently serves as the flagship of NASA’s exploration program. It cost more than $140 billion to build and requires about $3 billion annually to operate. NASA uses the station to test technologies, such as a water recycling system, that will extend the reach of humans into the solar system. The development of 3D printing represents an important step toward making repairs in space of equipment that might break down but can’t readily be replaced by the next supply ship from Earth. The goal is to bring NASA closer to “closed loop” systems for missions that, once they leave Earth behind, will be on their own.

The station also serves as a platform to test the effects of microgravity on human health, and the recent nearly year-long mission by Scott Kelly was only the most recent example of this. And finally, NASA views the station as an orbiting laboratory to conduct scientific research—both for exploration, such as the harvesting of plants grown in space, as well as to further human health on Earth. To that end, the S.S. Rick Husband will carry hundreds of experiments to space.

In May, a true research scientist, Kate Rubins, will fly to the space station aboard a Soyuz spacecraft to do much of the work. Rubins, who has a Ph.D. in Cancer Biology from Stanford University Medical School, studied viral diseases that primarily affect central and west Africa, including Ebola and Marburg and Lassa Fever. A former principal investigator at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research, Rubins led field work in the Democratic Republic of Congo to further the understanding of these diseases.

And she’s ready to do some more field work in space. “I’m looking forward to a pretty hefty research component,” Rubins said during a news conference earlier this month at Johnson Space Center. “I might end up trying to do some experiments on my own time because that’s what I’m most interested in.”

All told, Rubins will work on about 250 research experiments during her six months on board the station. She can’t pick a favorite, but she admits to being pretty excited about using the Biomolecule Sequencer, a tool to sequence DNA in microgravity for the first time. A space-based DNA sequencer would not only help identify microbes and potentially diagnose crew health problems, it might also one day detect DNA-based life elsewhere in the solar system.