Orbital cargo ship blasts off towards space station (Photo : Reuters)
A cargo ship arrived at the International Space Station with food and water supplies for the astronauts.
The Orbital ATK's Cygnus cargo ship with water and food supplies of more than 7,000 lbs (3,000 kg) arrived at the ISS. These water and food supplies are for the global astronauts, Yahoo News reported.
The spaceship was from Cape Canaveral Florida. It was atop an Atlas V rocket which was made by the United Launch Alliance, the report said.
The Orbital ATK as well as SpaceX supplies the ISS on a cargo missions with their Cygnus and Dragon spaceships under a contract with NASA. This is to supply food and water for the global astronauts in the ISS.
Not just a supply of food and water, the spaceship also carried materials to study the movement of gases and liquid, modules to study the growth of small organisms in space, flame-resistant and flame-retardant testing supplies and a set of measuring devices like cubesats, Space.com reported.
One-third of the supplies carried by the cargo consists of materials for research studies and space experiments. Moreover, the spaceship will return to burn up in the atmosphere of the Earth, the report said.
The ISS becomes a busy study place for astronauts including Japanese astronaut Kimiya Yui, Russian cosmonaut Mikhail Kornienko, NASA's Tim Kopra, British astronaut Tim Peake, cosmonauts Yuri Malenchenko and Sergey Volkov, the report added.
Watch the video by AFP about the orbital cargo ship that blasts off towards ISS for the supplies of food, water and other materials for research experiments.
