Article Posted on : - Feb 20, 2011

Progress M-07M spacecraft.

MOSCOW (ITAR-TASS): Specialists of the Mission Control Centre, Moscow Region, will undock Sunday a Progress ferry, working in the orbital complex for six months, from the International Space Station and will drop it in the Pacific.

"A command will be sent to Progress M-07M for undocking from the station at 16:09 MT, the spaceship will separate from the ISS three minutes later, and its unburned fragments will drop four hours later in a special area of the South Pacific," Mission Control specified.

A Mission Control representative noted that the tug, docked to the Zvezda service module, has been part of the orbital complex since last September 12. Progress M-07M set a record of a sort over this time: its jets were used to make eight adjustments of the station's orbit. Besides, Russian cosmonauts loaded manually over a tonne of garbage and worked-out equipment aboard the tug.

Progress M-07M will free a place at the Zvezda module for the second European cargo spaceship of the ATV series - Johannes Kepler -- that blasted off from the French Kourou cosmodrome on February 17. All docking units of the Russian segment are occupied: Progress M-07M and Progress M09M are at the Zvezda service module and at the Pirs docking module, respectively, while rescue craft - manned Soyuz spaceships - are "tethered" to the small laboratory modules Poisk and Rassvet.

According to calculations of Mission Control specialists, fragments of Progress M-07M will reach "the cemetery" of spaceships in South Pacific at 19:58 MT.