Cargo Ship Fails To Seal Tightly With Station
ANN REALTIME UPDATE 10.26.06 2030
EDT: All is well following some tense moments onboard the
International Space Station Thursday... after a Progress cargo
module had some problems securely attaching to the station.
Scientists traced the problem to a faulty antenna that failed to
retract for docking with the station, potentially interfering with
final latching. Russian flight controllers worked on the problem
for about three hours... before they determined the antenna was not
a problem, and gave the crew the all-clear for final docking.
Due to the long day, the three-man crew onboard the ISS will
wait until Friday before they unload the supplies, equipment,
propellant and oxygen carried onboard the Progress module.
Hey... better late than never.
Original Report
ANN REALTIME REPORTING 10.26.06 1340 EDT: A new
Progress docked to the International Space Station at 10:29 am EDT
Thursday with almost 2.5 tons of fuel, oxygen, other supplies and
equipment aboard... but there may be some problems with getting its
cargo onboard the station.
"The ship did not succeed in latching on tightly to the
station," Mission Control spokesman Valery Lyndin told The
Associated Press. "There is no danger to the crew."
CNN reports a faulty antenna apparently failed to hook up fully
to the station after what appeared to have been an uneventful
automated docking.
"The problem was linked to Progress' navigation antenna, which
failed to fold and prevented the ship and the station from being
fully linked," Lyndin said. "The unpleasant thing for the crew is
they can't immediately get to the supplies."
Russian Space Agency spokesman Igor Panarin states the station's
crew -- Expedition 14 crew members Commander Mike Lopez-Alegria,
flight engineer Mikhail Tyurin, and European Space Agency astronaut
Thomas Reiter -- has enough supplies for a safe stay in orbit, even
if the problem could not be fixed quickly.
NASA reports the station's 23rd Progress unpiloted cargo carrier
carries more than 1,900 pounds of propellant, about 110 pounds of
oxygen, and 2,784 pounds of dry cargo. P23 launched from the
Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan Monday at 9:41 am EDT. It reached
the station after a flight of just over three days.
P23's sister cargo carrier and a predecessor at the station, ISS
Progress 22, remains at the Pirs docking compartment. It is
scheduled to be undocked after it is emptied and subsequently
filled with station discards. It will be deorbited with its load of
trash and burn in the Earth's atmosphere on re-entry.
The Progress is similar in appearance and some design elements
to the Soyuz spacecraft, which brings crewmembers to the station,
serves as a lifeboat while they are there and returns them to
Earth. The aft module, the instrumentation and propulsion module,
is nearly identical.
But the second of the three Progress sections is a refueling
module, and the third, uppermost as the Progress sits on the launch
pad, is a cargo module. On the Soyuz, the descent module, where the
crew is seated on launch and which returns them to Earth, is the
middle module and the third is called the orbital module.
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