Progress spacecraft fails to dock with International Space Station

Friday, July 2, 2010

The unmanned Progress M-06M supply ship failed to dock with the International Space Station Friday due to an apparent critical communications failure. The spacecraft bypassed the station at a safe distance and NASA officials report that the six member American-Russian space station crew were never in any danger; however, flight controllers are struggling to determine what exactly went wrong.

It is believed that the abort was caused by a malfunction in the Progress spacecraft's automatic docking system, resulting in the loss of telemetry data. The malfunction occurred while the spacecraft was at a distance of several kilometers from the orbital outpost, and there was never any threat to the spacecraft or the station, report NASA officials. "The Progress literally flew past the station, but at a safe distance from the outpost," says NASA commentator Rob Navias, "The station crew reported seeing the Progress drift beyond their view, as they worked to reestablish telemetry with the spacecraft."

The Progress supply ship was intended to deliver food, water, fuel, and other supplies to the space station and was launched earlier this week. According to Russian officials, no additional docking attempts will be made today. Flight controllers in Moscow are analyzing the problem and are weighing the possibility of a second docking attempt within 48 hours, but this still remains to be determined.

Have an opinion on this story? Share it!

Sources

Tariq Malik. "Russian Cargo Ship Veers Out of Control Near Space Station" — Space.com, 2 July 2010
Space.com. "Unmanned Capsule Misses Space Station" — MSNBC, 2 July 2010

Share this:

This page is archived, and is no longer publicly editable.

Articles presented on Wikinews reflect the specific time at which they were written and published, and do not attempt to encompass events or knowledge which occur or become known after their publication.

Got a correction? Add the template {{editprotected}} to the talk page along with your corrections, and it will be brought to the attention of the administrators.

Please note that due to our archival policy, we will not alter or update the content of articles that are archived, but will only accept requests to make grammatical and formatting corrections.

Note that some listed sources or external links may no longer be available online due to age.

The text of this article is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License