An unmanned
cargo ship crammed with trash and unneeded items is casting off from the International Space
Station (ISS) to make way for the arrival of its replacement
later this week.
The
Russian-built Progress
22 supply ship was expected to leave its berth at the station's Pirs docking compartment at
6:29 p.m. EST (2329 GMT) Tuesday, NASA officials said. A planned engine burn three hours after undocking should send the disposable spacecraft to its planned destruction in the Earth's atmosphere, they added.
Progress 22's
ISS departure will clear the Pirs docking port for the Friday arrival of a new
cargo tug packed with more than 2.5 tons of fresh supplies, spare parts and
experiment hardware to replenish the station's three-astronaut crew of Expedition
14. That spacecraft, Progress 24, is poised to
launch for a Jan. 17 at 9:12 p.m. EST (0212 Jan. 18 GMT) from the Central
Asian spaceport of Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.
NASA spokesperson
Lynette Madison, of the U.S. agency's Johnson Space Center in Houston, told SPACE.com Tuesday
that the Expedition
14 crew - led by NASA astronaut Michael
Lopez-Alegria with Russian cosmonaut Mikhail
Tyurin and NASA's Sunita
Williams as flight engineers - packed Progress 22 with about the same
amount of cargo the space freighter hauled to the ISS last summer. The cargo ship originally
ferried about 2.5 tons of equipment and supplies to the space station on
June 26 during the Expedition
13 mission to the orbital laboratory.
NASA
officials said the Progress 24 supply ship to launch Wednesday will carry about 1,720
pounds (780 kilograms) of propellant, 110 pounds (49 kilograms) of oxygen and
about 3,285 pounds (1,490 kilograms) of dry cargo to the ISS. The fresh
supplies are expected to arrive at the space station on Friday at 10:03 p.m.
EST (0303 Jan. 20 GMT).
An earlier cargo
ship - Progress
23 - is also docked
at the aft end of the station's Russian-built Zvezda service module in November
and will be discarded later this year.
NASA
will provide live docking coverage of Progress 24's ISS arrival on Jan. 19 via
NASA TV beginning at 9:00 p.m. EST (0200 Jan. 20 GMT).
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