MOSCOW, October 27 (RIA Novosti) - The crew of the International Space Station has started opening the hatches of the Progress M-58 spaceship, Russia's Mission Control said Friday.
"The crew has received an instruction to open the hatches, and the astronauts have started implementing it," a spokesman said.
A Russian Mission Control spokesman said earlier Friday that the ISS crew reported that the spaceship has been fully linked with the ISS.
On Thursday, the Progress M-58 cargo spacecraft, bringing food, water and fuel to the crew of the orbital space station, failed to link up properly with the orbital station due to a docking antenna, which did not retract correctly.
"During a communication session that ended at 12:59 Moscow time [8:59 a.m. GMT], the crew reported that the docking hooks were latched, the latches functioned properly and the docking pin was retracted," the spokesman said. "As a result, the docking system worked fully, and yesterday's difficulty has been corrected."
When yesterday's initial docking maneuver failed, the cargo ship was backed away from the station on a docking pin and a new attempt was ordered, a spokesman for Mission Control Center said earlier.
The first docking attempt was not successful apparently due to the failure of an antenna of the Kurs auto-docking system on board the cargo vehicle to fold away, but the structural integrity of the spacecraft and the space station was not affected.
Earlier, Mission Control experts also considered two other possible remedies - a spacewalk, or an attempt to link the ship and the station without backing away. This, however, could have resulted in the antenna damaging the docking joints, and a different solution was decided on.
A Russian Soyuz-U booster rocket with the Progress M-58 cargo spacecraft was launched to the ISS from the Baikonur space center October 23 carrying food, water, fuel, research equipment and expendables.
