An unmanned
Russian-built cargo ship is headed for oblivion after casting off from the International
Space Station (ISS) on Monday.
The automated
space tug Progress 29 undocked from an Earth-facing berth on the station's
Russian Zarya control module Monday afternoon at 3:46 p.m. EDT (1946 GMT) to
begin a week of engine tests before destroying itself in the Earth's atmosphere
next week, officials with Russia's Federal Space Agency said.
"It went
very well, exactly as planned," NASA spokesperson Kelly Humphries told
SPACE.com from the Johnson Space Center in Houston.
Federal
Space Agency officials said Progress 29 will stay in space until Sept. 9 in
order to perform a series of experiments designed to study the plasma environment
surrounding its rocket engines. Then, the disposable spacecraft will be
commanded to burn up in the Earth's atmosphere over the southern Pacific Ocean,
they added.
Russia's
unmanned Progress spacecraft are routinely used to deliver food, water,
equipment and other vital supplies to astronauts living aboard the space
station. Once their supplies are spent, the space tugs are filled with trash,
waste and other unneeded items, and then jettisoned from the station to be
destroyed upon reentry.
Progress 29
launched toward the station from the Central Asian spaceport of Baikonur
Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on May 14 and arrived
at the orbiting laboratory two days later. The spacecraft delivered about
2.3 tons of fresh supplies to the station's three-man crew, which currently
consists of commander Sergei Volkov and flight engineer Oleg Kononenko - both of
Russia - and NASA flight engineer Greg Chamitoff.
The cargo
ship's Monday undocking is the first of two planned space station departures
this week. The cargo
ship Jules Verne, the first Automated Transfer Vehicle built by the
European Space Agency, is due to undock from its perch at the aft end of the
station's Russian-built Zvezda service module on Friday at 5:30 p.m. EDT (2130
GMT).
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