Kounotori 5, unmanned resupply vehicle, has been successfully launched on a Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency H-2B rocket. The vehicle will deliver a cargo to the International Space Station (ISS) crew.

The flock of Doves taken to the space station actually is a group of small CubeSat-class satellites being released as part of the NanoRacks CubeSat Deployer investigation.

The United States space agency NASA said the small satellites will capture imagery of earth for use in humanitarian, environmental and commercial applications. Furthermore, it said that the satellites will be joining a preexisting flock of 28 Doves that are presently orbiting approximately 22,236 miles above Earth.

On Monday, the HTV-5 will also deliver new materials for the ISS Twin Study, an ongoing project that is dedicated to better understand how the human body responds to spending time in space. This includes key human -omnic analyses.

Explaining the term -omics NASA researcher and astronaut, Kate Rubins, said the term means everything; it is like taking a snapshot of all of the activity inside a cell.

“For example, rather than observing a few genes at a time as researchers did in the early 1990s, scientists in the field of genomics investigate the activity of all of the genes in the genome simultaneously”, Rubins said.

Graham Scott, chief scientist at the National Space Biomedical Research Institute, said that these –omics-focused investigation will help in identifying specific biological pathways that are being affected by spaceflight.

He said if they will be able to understand what pathways are being affected and how they correlate to the physiology of the astronaut, they will be able to design individualized biological countermeasures for each astronaut.