Progress cargo ship serving as orbital lab to be sunken in Pacific

MOSCOW, September 1 (Itar-Tass) - Russia's cargo spacecraft Progress
that has flown for over a week on a low Earth orbit as a scientific
laboratory on Thursday will be sunken in the Pacific, the Mission Control
Centre (MCC) outside Moscow told Itar-Tass.
"At 13:33 MSK the Progress M-11M engines are to be switched on for
deceleration, the ship will begin a de-orbit manoeuvre and in 48 minutes
the cargo spacecraft's unburned fragments will reached the surface of the
Pacific," the MCC specified.
The Progress was undocked from the International Space Station (ISS)
on August 23 on a command from the Earth and taken to a lower orbit.
"During the spaceship's autonomous flight in orbit a session of the
geophysical experiment Radar-Progress was conducted the purpose of which
is to determine spatial-and-time dependencies of density, temperature and
ion composition of local non-uniformities of the ionosphere arising as a
result of the operation of spacecraft propulsion units," the MCC
explained. It was a continuation of Plasma-Progress experiment that was
conducted earlier on several "retired" ships, an MCC expert said.
Before undocking of the Progress ship from the ISS, the Russian
cosmonauts working at the station - Andrei Borisenko, Alexander
Samokutyayev and Sergei Volkov manually loaded on board the Progress more
than a tonne of garbage and spent equipment. It is difficult to determine
the exact weight of waste, because there are voluminous, but light cargoes
and also small but heavy containers, the MCC explained. Only one thing is
certain - the Progress craft is fully loaded. The MCC expert noted that
"at first the bulky cargoes that clutter up the station are loaded as a
rule," however, "usually something is left."
The Progress M-11M spacecraft will be sunken in a designated area of
the Pacific Ocean far from shipping routes.
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