https://phys.org/news/2018-07-nasa-space-botanist.html > The instrument was launched June 29 from Florida's Cape Canaveral Air Force Station on a SpaceX cargo resupply mission. It rode to orbit in the "trunk" of SpaceX's Dragon spacecraft, which berthed at the station on July 2. On July 5, ground controllers at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston extracted ECOSTRESS from the trunk, robotically transferred it to the station's Japanese Experiment Module—Exposed Facility (JEM-EF) and installed it. After a few days of testing and start-up activities, ECOSTRESS acquired its first-light image on July 9. > "Often satellite missions require weeks or months to produce data of the quality that we are already getting from ECOSTRESS," said the mission's principal investigator, Simon Hook of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. ECOSTRESS is one of a new class of low-cost, rapid-development NASA science instruments. The ECOSTRESS instrument was launched less than four years after the project was started.