TOMORROW: Out-of-control Russian spacecraft falling back to Earth

Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – @BednarChuck

An out-of-control Russian spacecraft that had been on its way to the International Space Station for a routine delivery of supplies is expected to fall back to Earth and burn up in the atmosphere Friday, according to media reports published Wednesday.

The unmanned Progress M-27M vessel, which launched from Kazakhstan more than a week ago, was carrying three metric tons of food, water, fuel, oxygen and equipment to the six-person crew when a communications failure caused ground control to lose contact with it.

Attempts to re-establish communication with Progress have failed, according to BBC News, and it has been spiraling out of control since last Tuesday, slowly descending and orbiting Earth in a pattern that which takes over the eastern US, Colombia, Brazil, and Indonesia.

Little risk of harm to anyone on the land

On Wednesday, officials from the Russian space agency Roscosmos said that they expected that the spacecraft would “end its existence” between 01:23 and 11:55 Moscow time Friday (between 6:23PM EST Thursday and 02:55AM EST Friday), according to the UK media outlet.

Most of the vessel is expected to burn up upon re-entry, with only “a few small parts” from the ship anticipated to reach the surface, the agency said. Any fragments that make it to the surface should hit the sea and not the land, drastically limiting the potential danger of the event.

“The likelihood of it coming down and hitting someone is…miniscule,” Cathleen Lewis, who is a specialist in the Russian space travel with the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum in Washington, said in an interview last week, according to BBC News.

A costly loss for the Russian space program

While Russia has set up a special commission to investigate the cause of the failures, as this was not the first of its kind. Last year, a Progress vessel was unable to deliver its payload and was instructed to re-enter and burn up in Earth’s atmosphere, and one of its forerunners was destroyed shortly after a 2011 take off in Siberia.

Even with the loss of the resupply ship, the astronauts on the ISS have enough supplies to tide them over until the next scheduled delivery, which is set to take place on June 19. BBC News, citing comments made by a Roscosmos spokesperson to the media, said that the loss of Progress has been valued at 2.59 billion rubles, or nearly $51 million dollars.

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