Progress M-20M cargo vehicle will be undocked from the ISS on Monday evening and will perform 8 controlled days flight during which “the Curve” scientific experiment will be conducted on its board, – Mission Control Centre representative reports.

Undocking is scheduled for February 3, 20:20 Moscow time. The spacecraft will perform controlled flight for “the Curve” scientific experiment. After that the vehicle will be sank in the Pacific Ocean on February 11, – the spokesman stated.

The Curve scientific experiment is aimed at microacceleration level detection, development
of mathematical model of gravitational conditions onboard the station and exploration of onboard systems operating modes impact on the ISS flight conditions.

The experiment description states: “in course of the flight there appear micro accelerations that may exceed rating acceptable for gravity sensitive experiments. That’s why these levels has to be controlled, the development of mathematic models that will enable to determine current micro acceleration levels and predict micro gravity level onboard the station for a given period of time.

“Curve” experiment was started by ISS-1 mission and continues up to the present time. In this period (ISS-1 – ISS-26) about 546 communication sessions was conducted due to which about 3 Gigabytes of information was received. The onset of convection due to the constant micro accelerations onboard the ISS, accelerations connected with station reboost maneuvers, dockings and undocking with Progress-M and Soyuz vehicles was experimentally proved.

Image credit – Roscosmos