Progress Spaceship, Iss Space Suit Will Be Sunken

MOSCOW. Dec 20 (Interfax) – A Russian Orlan-M space suit, which is currently being stored aboard the International Space Station (ISS), and a Progress-M50 supply ship will be de-orbited and crash into the Pacific Ocean, as their service lives have expired.

The operation will be conducted on the night of December 23, Russian Mission Control spokesman Valery Lyndin told Interfax on Monday.

“After the cargo spaceship disengages itself from the ISS at 10:38 p.m. on December 22, it will start to slow down, enter the dense layers of the atmosphere, and cease to exist after falling into the Pacific Ocean at 2:24 a.m. Moscow time on December 23. The area where the ship’s pieces will fall is located about 3,000 kilometers east of New Zealand’s capital of Wellington,” Lyndin said.

“One of Russia’s Orlan-M space suits, whose service life has expired, will be sunken together with the waste and old equipment aboard the Progress. Thus, the ISS will have three Russian Orlan and three U.S. EMU space suits. They are all in good order and can be used to conduct space walks,” he said.

De-orbiting a supply ship is a routine operation that precedes the launch of a new cargo spaceship to the ISS.

The next Progress-M51 supply ship is expected to take off from the Baikonur launch pad on December 24. It will deliver about 2.5 tonnes of cargoes to the ISS.

An earlier report indicated that the ISS crew – Russian cosmonaut Salizhan Sharipov and U.S. astronaut Leroy Chiao – might run out of food supplies in mid-January.