Modified cargo spacecraft Progress M-05M has been docked to the International Space Station, Valery Lyndin, the official spokesman for the Russian Ground Control Center said. "At 22:30, Commander Oleg Kotov manually docked Progress M-05M to the Pirs module," he said. The cargo carrier has delivered into orbit a payload of 2.5 tons. It consists of foodstuffs, fuel, equipment, as well as gifts for the crew - the Russians Oleg Kotov, Alexander Skvortsov and Mikhail Korniyenko; the Americans Tracy Caldwell Dyson and Timothy J. Creamer; and the Japanese Soichi Noguchi. Biochemists have sent a bioreactor and container with a suspension to the ISS for holding a fundamentally new experiment codenamed Cascade aboard the station. It envisions that two members of Expedition 23 - an astronaut/cosmonaut and an engineer - will take on the role of biotechnologists growing new crops on an imaginary interplanetary station, Itar-Tass reported. "The Cascade is an unusual experiment," Tatiana Krasheninnikova, the supervisor of several biotechnological experiments at the ISS said. "For the first time ever, the crewmembers will put the seedlings into the bioreactor right in orbit," she said, adding that the seedling had been placed into bioreactors on the Earth previously and the two-days-long deliveries into space had typically produced side effects. Now the cosmonauts Skvortsov and Korniyenko will be the first ones to test a biotechnological laboratory of the future. The experiment will be held at the end of May and Commander Kotov will take its results back to the Earth, Krasheninnikova said.
