A Soyuz capsule carrying two cosmonauts who will try to repair the Mir space station docked with the damaged craft yesterday, mission controllers at Korolyov just outside Moscow said.
The docking took place on schedule at 4.02 p.m. Irish time. The operation was carried out automatically up to a distance of about 15 metres from Mir, when the Soyuz crew switched to manual, the head of cosmonaut training, Mr Yuri Kargapolov, said.
The relief crew for the troubled Mir had blasted off into space on Tuesday from Kazakhstan.
They face the hazardous task of restoring Mir's power supply, which will involve an inspection of the dark and airless Spektr research module, punctured and depressurised in a collision with an unmanned cargo craft on June 25th.
The weary crew of Mir have had six months of tribulation aboard the 11-year-old orbiter, bedevilled by serious technical problems. Indeed, even as the relief cosmonauts approached Mir yesterday, the crew on board the space station concluded that more time would be needed to repair the craft's oxygen system.
The new problems appear to have been caused by blocked piping which must be replaced rather than repaired, the deputy flight director, Mr Viktor Blagov, said in Moscow. The US space shuttle Atlantis, due to dock with Mir in late September, would bring new piping and probably spare cable for a back-up system, he added. In the meantime the Mir crew will try to revive the older, back-up Elektron system, which is also off because it is in the Kvant-2 module. The crew "powered down" Kvant-2 to save energy after Mir collided with the re-supply ship. "All they need is a spare cable to plug it in," Mr Blagov said. "We hope we will manage to find it on Mir."
The newer Elektron system in the Kvant-1 module has not worked for a week, and for several days the US space agency, NASA, has diagnosed the problem as coming from air bubbles or contaminant in the system lines. Atlantis also brought oxygen canisters for the Mir crew.
Mr Blagov said the current situation was far from critical. "They have enough oxygen to breathe now and they have enough oxygen in stock," he said.
The crew will continue burning oxygen "candles", which were the only source of oxygen on Mir when it first started orbiting the Earth 11 years ago. Mr Blagov said the present stocks would last at least 2 1/2 months.
Meanwhile yesterday, the US space shuttle, Discovery, blasted off from Cape Canaveral, Florida with six astronauts aboard.
The $2 billion space ship surged off its launch pad at the Kennedy Space Centre at 3.41 p.m. Irish time.
After reaching orbit the astronauts deployed a German-built, free-flying satellite to monitor the Earth's protective ozone layer. The 3,200-kg spacecraft will fly free of the shuttle for nine days before the astronauts return to pick it up.
During their 11-day mission, the crew will also point a telescope at Comet Hale-Bopp, test a Japanese robot arm intended for use on the planned international space station, and grow colon cancer cells for medical research.