NASA - National Aeronautics and Space Administration

Progress Docks to Space Station

Image above: The Progress 33 cargo carrier approaches the International Space Station prior to docking. Credit: NASA

A new Progress cargo carrier docked to the Pirs docking compartment of the International Space Station at 3:24 p.m. EDT Tuesday with more than 2 ½ tons of food, fuel and supplies. The Progress linked up to Pirs as it and the ISS flew 220 miles over the Mongolian-Chinese border.

The ISS Progress 33 launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on Thursday at 2:37 p.m. It replaces the Progress 32 which undocked from the station May 6. Filled with trash and other discarded items, Progress 32 will be deorbited over the Pacific Ocean on May 18. Prior to deorbit, ground controllers will perform a series of engine firings and study their effect on plasma in the Earth’s atmosphere.

Once the station crew has unloaded its cargo, Progress 33 will be filled with trash and station discards. It will be undocked from the station later this year, and like its predecessors, also will be deorbited to burn in the Earth's atmosphere.

The Progress is similar in appearance and some design elements to the Soyuz spacecraft, which brings crew members to the station, serves as a lifeboat while they are there and returns them to Earth. The aft module, the instrumentation and propulsion module, is nearly identical.

But the second of the three Progress sections is a refueling module, and the third, uppermost as the Progress sits on the launch pad, is a cargo module. On the Soyuz, the descent module, where the crew is seated on launch and which returns them to Earth, is the middle module and the third is called the orbital module.

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2009 International Space Station Calendar

As part of NASA's celebration of the 10th anniversary of the International Space Station, the agency is offering a special 2009 calendar to teachers, as well as the general public.

The calendar contains photographs taken from the space station and highlights historic NASA milestones and fun facts about the international construction project of unprecedented complexity that began in 1998.

› Download calendar (5.3 Mb PDF)