The ISS Progress 26 (P26/M-61) craft launched Thursday from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan at 1:34 p.m. EDT. The P26 vehicle is loaded with 5,111 pounds of food, fuel, air, water and supplies. P26 is scheduled to dock with the station on Aug. 5.
On the station, Commander Fyodor Yurchikhin and Flight Engineer Olog Kotov reconfigured the Kurs automated rendezvous system in the Zvezda Service Module in preparation for the P26 docking.
Wednesday's undocking of the ISS Progress 24 (P24) was successfully completed at 10:07 a.m. Configuration issues resulted in the Progress not doing the separation burn, but the deorbit burn occurred on time. P24 was about four miles from the station when the deorbit burn began a little after 2:40 p.m. Wednesday, sending the Progress and its load of trash to destruction in the Earth's atmosphere.
The station's 26th Progress unpiloted spacecraft will bring to the orbiting laboratory almost 1,600 pounds of propellant, more than 100 pounds of air and oxygen, more than 465 pounds of water and 2,954 pounds of dry cargo. Total cargo weight is 5,111 pounds.
Among the dry cargo are spares for Russian computers that had problems during the STS-117 mission of Atlantis to the station in June.
The Progress is similar in appearance and some design elements to the Soyuz spacecraft, which brings crew members 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.
posted 08-02-2007 01:48 PM
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