SpaceX launched thousands of tiny sea creatures to the International Space Station on Thursday, along with a plaque-fighting toothpaste experiment and powerful solar panels.

The 7,300-pound (3,300-kilogram) shipment—which also includes fresh lemons, onions, avocados and cherry tomatoes for the station's seven astronauts—should arrive Saturday.

SpaceX's Falcon rocket blasted into the hazy afternoon sky from Kennedy Space Center. The first-stage booster was new for a change, landing on an offshore platform several minutes after liftoff so it can be recycled for a NASA astronaut flight this fall.

The Dragon cargo capsule—also brand new—is delivering the first of three sets of high-tech solar panels designed to bolster the space station's aging power grid. Astronauts will conduct two spacewalks later this month to help install the two roll-out panels alongside solar wings that have been in continuous operation for 20 years.

More power will be needed to accommodate the growing number of ticket-buying visitors, NASA's space station program manager, Joel Montalbano, said Wednesday.

The cargo includes samples of saliva and oral bacteria from dental patients that will be treated with toothpaste and mouthwash in an experiment aimed at keeping astronauts' teeth and gums healthy in space.

The team behind NASA's InSight Mars lander has come up with an innovative way to boost the spacecraft's energy at a time when its power levels have been falling. The lander's robotic arm trickled sand near one solar panel, helping the wind to carry off some of the panel's dust. The result was a gain of about 30 watt-hours of energy per sol, or Martian day.

Mars is approaching aphelion, its farthest point from the Sun. That means less sunlight reaches the spacecraft's dust-covered solar panels, reducing their energy output. The team had planned for this before InSight's two-year mission extension. They've designed the mission to operate without science instruments for the next few months before resuming science operations later this year. During this period, InSight will reserve power for its heaters, computer, and other key components.

The power boost should delay the instruments being switched off by a few weeks, gaining precious time to collect additional science data. The team will try to clear a bit more dust from the same solar panel this Saturday, June 5, 2021.

Europe's Galileo satellite navigation constellation is set to grow. Later this year the first two out of 12 "Batch 3" Galileo satellites will be launched by Soyuz from French Guiana. Their last step on the way to launch is situated beside sand dunes on the Dutch coast: the ESTEC Test Center, which is Europe's largest satellite test facility.

All but two of the 26 Galileo satellites already in orbit underwent pre-flight testing at this 3000 sq. m environmentally-controlled complex, hosting test equipment to simulate all aspects of spaceflight. The Test Center is operated and managed by European Test Services for ESA.

All 12 Batch 3 satellites—functionally similar to the Full Operational Capability satellites already in orbit—are scheduled to come here from OHB in Germany to assess their readiness for space, before heading on to French Guiana.

When the Falcon 9 rocket launches on June 3, it will be carrying thousands of pounds of cargo to the International Space Station aboard SpaceX's 22nd commercial resupply services mission. Yet the last five items to be loaded will weigh less than an ounce. These include two plant and two animal species along with a microbial study. Scientists will examine these to better understand how to prepare future astronauts for the rigors of long-distance space travel, as well as unlock a few secrets that may benefit all of humankind back on Earth.

Briefly, the two animal experiments and the microbial study consist of:

A team of Leiden astronomers has managed to calculate the first 100 million years of the history of the Oort cloud in its entirety. Until now, only parts of the history had been studied separately. The cloud, with roughly 100 billion comet-like objects, forms an enormous shell at the edge of our solar system. The astronomers will soon publish their comprehensive simulation and its consequences in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.

The Oort cloud was discovered in 1950 by the Dutch astronomer Jan Hendrik Oort to explain why there continue to be new comets with elongated orbits in our solar system. The cloud, which starts at more than 3000 times the distance between the Earth and the Sun, should not be confused with the Kuiper belt.