Russia's M-18M cargo spaceship ends mission

An unmanned Russian cargo spaceship has disintegrated into the Pacific Ocean after resupplying the International Space Station, the space agency Roscosmos said Friday. "At 03:53 Moscow time (Thursday 2353 GMT) the engine of the Progress M-18M was ignited and after a 210-second impulse the craft left orbit," Roscosmos said. Fragments of the space freighter, which was loaded with trash from the ISS, sank in the Pacific Ocean, approximately 4,000 km from New Zealand's capital Wellington. The Progress M-18M was docked with the ISS for five and a half months and supplied the station with some 2.5 tons of cargo, including fuel, water, food, oxygen, musical discs and research equipment. Russian cosmonauts Pavel Vinogradov, Alexander Misurkin and Fyodor Yurchikhin, NASA astronauts Christopher Cassidy and Karen Nyberg, as well as Italian Luca Parmitano are working aboard the ISS. The next space freighter to the ISS, Progress M-20M, is scheduled to lift off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on Saturday.