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craft docks with space station to replenish food s Craft docks with space station to replenish food supply
US-Russian crew low on provisions was told to ration

By Associated Press | December 26, 2004

An unmanned Russian spaceship on a vital supply mission docked with the International Space Station last night to deliver a cargo of food for the two-member US-Russian crew, who had been forced to ration their dwindling supplies.
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The Progress M-51 lifted off Friday from the remote Baikonur cosmodrome in the steppes of Kazakhstan and moored at the station last night, officials at Russian mission control said.

The spaceship carried about 2.5 tons of food, water, fuel, and research equipment for Russian cosmonaut Salizhan Sharipov and US astronaut Leroy Chiao, who are in their second month on the station.

Russian and American space officials were alarmed to learn that the two had gone through so much food on the station.

National Aeronautics and Space Administration officials have said there was enough food to last seven to 14 days beyond Dec. 25, but warned that the crew would be forced to return to Earth if Progress did not successfully dock at the station.

The crew had been ordered to cut back on meals because food is running short, and the ITAR-Tass news agency said that there was no turkey for Christmas dinner.

Officials at Russian Mission Control in Korolyov, outside Moscow, sought to play down concerns, saying the crew has enough food for another month.

"The crew isn't hungry or thirsty," Mission Control chief Vladimir Solovyov said with a grin.

"We are running short of food due to the break in shuttle flights, but it would be absolutely wrong to dramatize the situation and say they have nothing to eat," he added.

Russian Soyuz crew capsules and Progress cargo ships have been the only link to the space station since the US shuttle fleet was grounded after the shuttle Columbia burned up on reentry in February 2003, killing all seven astronauts aboard.

The Progress was also carrying Christmas presents for the crew from their families and friends, as well as scientific equipment, including a German-made robotic device.

NASA has said it plans to resume its shuttle program in May, including trips to the space station.

An independent team was looking into how the orbiting station's food inventory ended up being tracked so poorly and how it can be improved.

Sharipov and Chiao have faced other setbacks to their international mission.

Their launch to the station in October was delayed twice -- once after the accidental detonation of an explosive bolt used to separate the ship's various components, and then when a tank with hydrogen peroxide burst because of a sudden change in pressure.

While NASA is considering using more unmanned spacecrafts to perform many of the space shuttle's functions, officials say having humans in space is essential for building the International Space Station, the massive orbiting research laboratory that is under assembly.

Construction of the space station was put on hold because of the halt in shuttle operations last year.

The station is owned by 16 nations, including the United States, Russia, Canada, and Japan. The United States has provided most of the funding for the project, but Russia has designed and built most of its key parts, including the module where the astronauts reside.

In a separate space exploration mission, scientists at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., said yesterday they believed the Titan moon probe was cleanly released last night from the international Cassini spacecraft that had carried it to the Saturn atmosphere.

The probe was safely on its way into the hazy atmosphere of Titan, Saturn's planet-size moon.

The European Space Agency's Huygens probe carried instruments that may reveal more about the moon's chemistry and whether Titan actually has lakes or seas of liquid methane and ethane that have been theorized by scientists.

Cassini used springs to gently push the 705-pound probe away late Friday night at a rate of 1 foot per second, sending it on a three-week free fall toward Titan.

Cassini will make a course change next week to avoid following the probe into the moon's atmosphere.

The probe's successful launch from Cassini put smiles on the faces of scientists in the control room at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, who received radio confirmation of the release about an hour after the event.

The signal had to travel hundreds of millions of miles from Saturn to the Earth.

"This was a big one partly because we had to do this right or no mission at all," said David Southwood, science program director of the European Space Agency.

A detailed analysis of the release was underway, but there were no indications of problems, said Earl Maize, the Cassini deputy program manager at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

"We are quite confident we had a very clean release," he said.


in a side note the hygens probe has also detached correctly just in one google news for all us space buffs - another 3 weeks before it hits titan though