Perfect Docking For Cargo Ship, Good Sign For Discovery?

By Dee Chisamera
08:34, May 17th 2008
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Perfect Docking For Cargo Ship, Good Sign For Discovery?

The International Space Station welcomed a new Progress cargo carrier on Friday at 5:39 p.m. supplying over 2.3 tons of fuel, air water, propellant, equipment and more, NASA reported, adding that the carrier docked to the Earth-facing port of the ISS.

P29, which is an unpiloted craft, started its space journey on Wednesday, when it was launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, at 4:22 p.m. The station’s 29th Progress replaces P28, which was filled with trash and destroyed after it was undocked from Pirs on April 7.

The new cargo carries more than 770 pounds of propellant, more than 100 pounds of oxygen and air, about 925 pounds of water and 2,850 pounds of dry cargo, weighting a total of 4,675 pounds.

P29 docked with the help of the automated Kurs system. The entire operation was under Expedition 17 Commander Sergei Volkov’s supervision, who was at the manual TORU docking systems controls, in case something didn’t go according to plan.

After the members of Expedition 17 will finish the unloading of the cargo, which was set to start on Saturday morning at 7:30 EDT, they will begin filling the cargo with trash and station discards. The cargo will then be discarded to burn up in the atmosphere.

The Progress cargo looks very similar to the Soyuz spacecraft, which carried Expedition 16 members back to Earth. The similarities include the aft module, the instrumentation and propulsion module, NASA experts explained.

The perfect docking is a good sign before the space shuttle Discovery, and which will carry seven astronauts and a Japanese science laboratory, will be launched on May 31 from the Kennedy Space Center.



Image Credit: www.nasa.gov
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Tags: NASA, P29, ISS, cargo
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