SpaceX's Dragon lifted off on a Falcon 9 rocket from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida on Saturday, May 4, with more than 5,500 pounds of research, equipment, cargo and supplies that will support dozens of investigations aboard the International Space Station. | Image: SpaceX

The SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket with the Dragon cargo module lifted off from the Florida Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station on May 4. The Commercial Resupply Services mission (CRS-17) launched over 5,550 pounds of NASA cargo into orbit and successfully delivered it to the International Space Station (ISS) on May 6.

Included in this cargo was a Texas A&M University undergraduate capstone team’s final project, an experiment facility known as Hermes, which will be used to conduct experiments on asteroid particles in space.

The team, made up of Multidisciplinary Engineering Technology (MXET) mechatronics students Luis Orozco (embedded software), Dustin Tish (hardware systems) and Jeremy Coffelt (Python software, security and communications), celebrated the culmination of over a year’s work as they watched their project be launched into space.