Russia's cargo spaceship, Progress, had docked with the International Space Station (ISS) after three hours spent troubleshooting a telemetric system failure, a Mission Control spokesman said on Friday.

The spaceship had difficulty docking with the ISS because the spacecraft's telemetric system had malfunctioned, the Interfax news agency reported on Friday.

"The Mission Control stopped receiving telemetric data on the docking process when the cargo ship was at the final stage of approaching the station," the spokesman was quoted by Interfax as saying.

The telemetric data transmission system failed to confirm that one of the antennae on the spaceship's surface had folded and therefore there was a threat that it could become stuck in the gap separating the spacecraft and the ISS, he said.

The Progress M-58 ship initially docked at the station at 6:28 p.m. Moscow time (1428 GMT) as planned on Thursday, but the operation was hindered from being completed as experts had received no confirmation that an antenna had folded as required during docking.

After three hours of troubleshooting, the docking operation was completed on Thursday night, and astronauts on the ISS were opening the hatches between the orbiting outpost and the Progress on Friday to unload the supplies from the craft.

"The ISS crew opened the station's hatches, and an order to open the hatches of the supply spacecraft was given. All operations were performed smoothly," the Mission Control said.

The Progress M-58 blasted off from the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on Monday to deliver more than 2.5 tons of supplies to the ISS crew, including food, water, fuel, equipment and parcels from families of the ISS astronauts.

Source: Xinhua