Progress M-3
Encyclopedia
Progress M-3 was a Soviet
Soviet Union
The Soviet Union , officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics , was a constitutionally socialist state that existed in Eurasia between 1922 and 1991....

 unmanned cargo spacecraft which was launched in 1990 to resupply the Mir
Mir
Mir was a space station operated in low Earth orbit from 1986 to 2001, at first by the Soviet Union and then by Russia. Assembled in orbit from 1986 to 1996, Mir was the first modular space station and had a greater mass than that of any previous spacecraft, holding the record for the...

 space station. The twentieth of sixty four Progress flights to visit Mir, it was a Progress-M
Progress-M
Progress-M , also known as Progress 7K-TGM, is a Russian, previously Soviet spacecraft which is used to resupply space stations. It is a variant of the Progress spacecraft, originally built in the late 1980s as a modernised version of the Progress 7K-TG spacecraft, using new systems developed for...

 11F615A55 spacecraft, and had the serial number
Serial number
A serial number is a unique number assigned for identification which varies from its successor or predecessor by a fixed discrete integer value...

 203. It carried supplies including food, water and oxygen for the EO-6
Mir EO-6
Mir EO-6 was the sixth long duration expedition to the space station Mir. The two crew members were Anatoli Soloviyov and Aleksandr Balandin .-Crew:...

 crew aboard Mir, as well as equipment for conducting scientific research, and fuel for adjusting the station's orbit and performing manoeuvres.

Progress M-3 was launched at 23:10:57 GMT on 28 February 1990, atop a Soyuz-U2
Soyuz-U2
The Soyuz-U2 was a Soviet, later Russian, carrier rocket. It was derived from the Soyuz-U, and a member of the R-7 family of rockets...

 carrier rocket flying from Site 1/5
Gagarin's Start
Gagarin's Start is a launch site at Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, used for the Soviet space program and now managed by the Russian Federal Space Agency....

 at the Baikonur Cosmodrome
Baikonur Cosmodrome
The Baikonur Cosmodrome , also called Tyuratam, is the world's first and largest operational space launch facility. It is located in the desert steppe of Kazakhstan, about east of the Aral Sea, north of the Syr Darya river, near Tyuratam railway station, at 90 meters above sea level...

. It docked with the aft port of the Kvant-1
Kvant-1
Kvant-1 was the second module of the Soviet space station Mir. It was the first addition to the Mir base block and contained scientific instruments for astrophysical observations and materials science experiments....

module at 01:04:32 GMT on 3 March. During the 56 days for which it was docked with Mir, the station was in an orbit of around 378 by, with 51.6 degrees of inclination
Inclination
Inclination in general is the angle between a reference plane and another plane or axis of direction.-Orbits:The inclination is one of the six orbital parameters describing the shape and orientation of a celestial orbit...

.

Progress M-3 undocked at 20:24:43 GMT on 27 April to make way for Progress 42. It was deorbited at 00:00:00 GMT the next day. It burned up in the atmosphere over the Pacific Ocean
Pacific Ocean
The Pacific Ocean is the largest of the Earth's oceanic divisions. It extends from the Arctic in the north to the Southern Ocean in the south, bounded by Asia and Australia in the west, and the Americas in the east.At 165.2 million square kilometres in area, this largest division of the World...

, with any remaining debris landing in the ocean at around 00:52 GMT.

See also

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