CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. -- Carrying fuel, food and other supplies to the International Space Station (ISS), a robot Progress freighter arrived at the frontier outpost Sunday and successfully docked to one end of the complex.
A black and white television view of the ISS from a camera aboard Progress showed the station occupants and flight controllers on the ground how well the vehicle was doing in aligning its crosshairs with a docking target on one end of the outpost.
"Contact and capture," said NASA mission commentator Rob Navias. "A successful three-day rendezvous for the Progress from its launch from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan."
The unmanned spacecraft -- the seventh in a series of such supply missions to the station -- was lofted into Earth orbit by a Russian Soyuz rocket that blasted off at 3:13 p.m. EST (2013 GMT) Thursday, March 21.
Normally a Progress vehicle takes two days to fly its carefully orchestrated approach to the space station, but this time it took three. The reason: Russian mission controllers wanted time to test three new devices that were installed on the Progress to measure changes in speed, Navias said.
Current station commander Yuri Onufrienko watched from inside the Zvezda service module during Progress' final approach, ready to take manual control of the normally automated operation if anything went wrong.Nothing did and the Progress spacecraft pulled up to a station docking port at 3:58 p.m. EST (2058 GMT), as the multi-nation research laboratory cruised in darkness some 240 miles (386 kilometers) above Central Asia.
Within a few minutes a series of latches and hooks closed and firmly locked Progress to the end of Zvezda, creating an air-tight seal between the two ship's hatches, which were scheduled to be opened about three hours later.
Inside the cargo carrier is several tons of equipment and supplies for the Expedition Four crew -- which includes Onufrienko and U.S. astronauts Dan Bursch and Carl Walz -- as well as the Expedition Five crew that is to be launched toward the station on May 31.
Having worked a very long day Sunday to deal with the docking, the Expedition Four crew will sleep in on Monday and then have a light day of activity, which includes beginning to unpack the Progress, Navias said.
The pace of their activity will quickly increase, however, as they begin looking forward to receiving their first set of visitors since they arrived at the station in December.
STS-110 is next
Shuttle Atlantis is targeted to lift off April 4 on an 11-day station assembly mission, but first the Expedition Four crew must receive and test new computer software that hopefully will provide a temporary solution to a hardware problem with the station's new Canadian robot arm.
A brake on the Canadarm2's wrist roll joint -- one of seven joints on the arm -- will not release when commanded to by its computer. The brake does release when the computer is in its backup mode, but mission managers want the arm to work normally in both the primary and back up modes.
The software that will allow this -- at least for the Atlantis mission -- is to be tested in space on April 1 and if that test goes well then Atlantis and its seven crewmembers will be cleared to launch as planned on April 4, NASA officials said last week.
But if there is a problem with that test, Atlantis' flight could face a delay ranging from a couple of days to several weeks.
The duration of the delay would depend on how much time it would take to adjust the software and re-test it, as well as how long it might take to train the Atlantis crew in any new procedures that might be called for with a change in the software.
Atlantis is to carry a new 43-foot-long (13-meter-long) truss that will serve as the centerpiece for the station's next phase of construction and the outpost's Canadarm2 -- and its balky wrist roll joint -- is the only way the so-called S0 truss can be lifted from the shuttle's cargo bay and installed on the Destiny science module.
The shuttle's robot arm doesn't have the reach to do the job.
NASA already has delayed launch of the next mission scheduled to fly after Atlantis because of the station's robot arm problem.
STS-111 already delayed
Shuttle Endeavour's mission to bring up the Expedition Five crew and return home the Expedition Four crew was officially bumped Friday from May 6 to May 31.
The reason: Officials want to add a third spacewalk to Endeavour's mission so the faulty joint on the station's Canadarm2 can be replaced. The extra time is required to deliver and install the hardware in Endeavour and to train the spacewalkers how to do the task.
Because of the delay in Endeavour's flight Expedition Four's voyage home is now targeted for June 12. As a result, Walz and Bursch will have spent 189 days in space and go into the record books as having flown America's longest-duration mission.
They would beat by one day the mark set by Shannon Lucid during her 1996 stay aboard the Russian space station Mir, Navias said.
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