Russian Progress spacecraft arrives at the ISS with 2.8 tons of cargo

The astronauts on board the International Space Station (ISS) just got a fresh shipment of supplies.

Russia’s robotic Progress 93 spacecraft docked with the orbiting lab’s Zvezda module at 1:23 p.m. EDT (1723 GMT) today (Sept. 13), two days after launching atop a Soyuz rocket from the Russia-run Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.

The meetup occurred today as the two spacecraft were flying 260 miles (418 kilometers) over northeastern Kazakhstan.

Progress is loaded with 2.8 tons of food, fuel and other cargo for the astronauts of the ISS’ current Expedition 73 mission, according to NASA officials.

The freighter will remain at the ISS for about six months, after which it will undock, head back down toward Earth and die a fiery death in our planet’s atmosphere.

Progress 93 joins four other spacecraft at the ISS. Two of them are fellow freighters (another Progress and a robotic SpaceX Dragon capsule) and two are crew-carrying spacecraft (a Russian Soyuz and Endeavour, the Dragon that’s flying SpaceX’s Crew-11 astronaut mission for NASA).

And yet another vehicle will head up soon — Northrop Grumman’s Cygnus cargo spacecraft, which is scheduled to launch on Sunday (Sept. 14) and arrive at the ISS on Wednesday (Sept. 17).

There are seven people living aboard the ISS at the moment: Zena Cardman, Mike Fincke and Jonny Kim of NASA; Kimiya Yui of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA); and Sergey Ryzhikov, Alexey Zubritsky and Oleg Platonov of the Russian space agency Roscosmos.

Ryzhikov commands Expedition 73. His six crewmates are all flight engineers.