Today, a robotic cargo spaceship from Russia apparently exprienced a glitch shortly after its launch to the International Space Staton that delayed its arrival and could probably endanger its arrival to the orbiting lab.

The launch of the Russia's unmanned Progress 59 spacecraft was at 3:09 A.M. EDT where the spacecraft was blasted off into space via a Soyuz rocket from the Baikonur Cosmodrome, Kazakhstan in Central Asia. The initial launch itself was smooth sailing untill the cargo vessel separated from the rocket's first stage.

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NASA launch commentators said that the solar arrays of the spacecraft were deployed on schedule however the navigational antennas did not apparently deploy. Apart from these technical mishaps, Russian mission controllers encountered problems uplinking commands to Progress 59 where the spacecraft's propulsion system could also be part of the delay. 

The Russian spacecraft is filled with 6,000 pounds of cargo resupply that includes food, fuel and other supplies that is slated to arrive at the ISS within a period of six hours from launch to liftoff at around 9:00 A.M. EDT. However, the antenna anomaly will delay the docking attempt by nearly 48 hours to 5:03 A.M. on Thursday, April 30.

The route to the ISS was supposedly a fast track four orbit one however this two day journey requires 34 orbits to complete which is the nominal backup plan for all the Soyuz and Progress spacecrafts. To date, it is still unclear if the problems have risen from the moment after liftoff or if they are even fixable.

Initial telemetry readings did suggest that Progress 59's automated rendezvous antennas entered into deployment failure. Later telemetry revealed that the Kurs antennas are now behaving normally but the other did not apparently deploy.

Progress is just one of four different robotic crafts that ferry cargo to the ISS. The others include SpaceX's Dragon and Orbital ATK's Cygnus spacecraft along with Japan's H-II Transfer Vehicle. The Dragon capsule is apparently the only reusable vessel among the three where the others are designed to burn up into the planet's atmosphere after the mission.

Tagsrussian cargo ship delayed arrival space station, ISS, progress 59, soyuz rocket, russian cargo ship progress 59