The Russian cargo ship Progress M-66\/32P has launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome, ahead of docking with the International Space Station (ISS) on February 13. The resupply vehicle is carrying 2.5 tons of cargo for the Station\u2019s Expedition 18 crew.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Included in its supplies are more than 1,900 pounds of propellant, just over 100 pounds of air and oxygen, almost 250 pounds of water, and around 2,800 pounds of dry cargo.<\/p>\n
Following the undocking and disposal of the previous cargo ship, Progress M-65\/31P, the new vehicle will mark what is likely to be a busy period of arrivals for the orbital outpost.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe ISS is going to have quite a bit of traffic this year,\u201d noted this week\u2019s MOD 8th Floor news on L2. \u201c31P had a nominal undock this week loitered for a few days to perform some experimentation. Deorbit occurred nominally on Feb 8. 32P will be following close on its heels. It will dock on Friday Feb 13th at 1:19am Central time.<\/p>\n
\u201c15A\/STS-119 will launch soon thereafter \u2013 pending Shuttle discussions regarding the Flow Control Valves (FCVs). Soyuz 18S will perform a crew rotation in March, with 19S following in May, which will increase the crew size to 6 from its current 3.\u201d<\/p>\n
For the Progress M-66 docking, RSC-Energia reported that subset number 2 of the KURS-P automated rendezvous radio system aboard the SM (Service Module has been approved as backup for subset number 1. Subset number 3 will be standby as \u201ccold reserve\u201d, and an additional backup will be provided by the manual TORU system.<\/p>\n
Progress M-66 will arrive at a busy ISS, following the successful reactivation of the Russian CO2 removal device (Vozdukh), which will play a key role when the Station is increased to a crew of six later this year.<\/p>\n
Space Shuttle (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({});<\/p>\n \u201cThe Russian CO2 removal device, the Vozdukh shut down unexpectedly this week. Since it is an important backup to the US CDRA CO2 removal device, the Russian team performed a quick assessment of the anomaly,\u201d added the 8th Floor ISS update.<\/p>\n \u201cThey determined that a vacuum pump which was operating well in excess of it\u2019s predicted life (by a factor of 12) finally failed. They replaced that pump and reactivated the Vozdukh normally.<\/p>\n The 8th Floor also reiterated confirmation that the Station is unlikely to have suffered any structural damage during the \u201cshaky\u201d January 14 reboost via the engines on the Zvezda service module \u2013 although evaluations are continuing.<\/p>\n \u201cYou have probably heard about the SM engine based reboost that produced quite a bit more vibration then what is normally expected. Generally ISS reboosts are performed by the Progress resupply ship thrusters, which are quite a bit less powerful then the SM main engines. This is because the aft port of the SM is usually occupied by a Progress vehicle.<\/p>\n \u201cHowever, although the SM main engines are not used very often, they have been utilized for reboosts in the past, with good success. Once the engineers analyzed the data from the reboost, it was determined that the optimum control system set of parameters had not been loaded, so the thruster control placed a larger forcing function on structure then anticipated.<\/p>\n \u201cThe community has been assessing the overall loading conditions and at this time it looks like the structures will still meet their normal lifetime capability.\u201d<\/p>\n L2 members<\/em><\/em>: All documentation \u2013 from which the above article has quoted snippets \u2013 is available in full in the related L2 sections, now over 4000 gbs in size.<\/em><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The Russian cargo ship Progress M-66\/32P has launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome, ahead of docking with the International Space Station (ISS) on February 13. The resupply vehicle is carrying 2.5 tons of cargo for the Station\u2019s Expedition 18 crew. Included in its supplies are more than 1,900 pounds of propellant, just over 100 pounds of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[233,7900],"class_list":["post-41193","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","tag-iss","tag-russian"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41193"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=41193"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41193\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=41193"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=41193"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=41193"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}