Russian spacecraft 'resting' in the Pacific Ocean

Russia's unmanned space transport ship Progress M-15M has ended its mission to bring goods to supply to the International Space Station (ISS) after being sunk in the South Pacific waters on the 20th. 8 , RIA Novosti cited sources from the Russian Mission Control Center.

"The remaining fragments of the space transport ship crashed into the sea at around 12:12 pm on August 20 (Russian time, ie 23 hours 12 minutes on the same day as Vietnam time), in a remote area New. Zealand is about 3,000 km to the east, " a center spokesman said.

A Russian Progress ship

Reportedly, the Progress M-15M was launched into space by the Russian Federal Space Agency (Roscosmos) from Russia's Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on April 20, 2012. The ship carrying 2.35 tons of goods including fuel, food and water came to connect with ISS two days later.

On July 23, the Progress M-15M was separated from ISS to test Russia's new automatic upgrade connection system (Kurs-NA).

However, the first attempt to assemble ISS on 24/7 with the Progress M-15M by Kurs-NA system failed. In the second attempt on July 29, after Russian engineers reprogrammed the control system, the Progress M-15M was successfully assembled into the ISS gate.

According to RIA Novosti, the Progress M-15M ended its mission on ISS on July 31, after leaving the station to begin three weeks of orbit flight to test radar systems to study physical properties. of the ionosphere conditions around the spacecraft, caused by the operation of liquid propulsion engines.

It is known that the Progress ships are "backbones" in transporting goods and equipment to provide for ISS. In addition, it undertakes missions to help adjust the ISS trajectory with its propulsion and perform other experiments.