Those four crew members arrived together in November aboard a SpaceX Crew Dragon craft launched from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida to begin a six-month stint in orbit. Remaining aboard the space station with the newcomers until the next rotation in a couple of months are three NASA astronauts - Tom Marshburn, Raja Chari and Kayla Barron - and German crewmate Matthias Maurer of the European Space Agency. Vande Hei will have logged a NASA record-breaking 355 days in orbit by the time he returns to Kazakhstan aboard a Soyuz capsule with his two cosmonaut colleagues. They will be replacing three current ISS crew members scheduled to fly back to Earth on March 30 - cosmonauts Pyotr Dubrov and Anton Shkaplerov and U.S. The Soyuz team, just beginning a science mission set to last 6-1/2 months, was led by commander Oleg Artemyev, accompanied spaceflight rookies Denis Matveev and Sergey Korsakov. They were greeted warmly with hugs and handshakes by all seven existing space station occupants who were waiting for them on the other side of the short corridor.
Link-up of the space vehicles took place as the Soyuz and space station flew some 250 miles (400 km) above eastern Kazakhstan, a NASA commentator said.Ībout 2-1/2 hours later, after the passageway between the station and Soyuz was pressurized, two sets of hatches were opened and the three smiling Soyuz astronauts, dressed in yellow flight suits, floated head-first, one by one, into the ISS. “Congratulations on the successful docking,” a voice from Russia’s mission control said moments later, according to an English translator speaking during a live NASA webcast of the event. The rendezvous with the space station capped a flight of three hours and 10 minutes following liftoff of the Soyuz spacecraft from Russia’s Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. Please contact us for subscription options.The arrival of the latest cosmonaut team – warmly welcomed by four Americans, two Russians and a German crewmate already aboard – came a day after the European Space Agency (ESA) announced it had suspended a joint robotic rover mission to Mars with Russia due to the Ukraine conflict. The CRS-25 mission is expected to last 33 days.Īnadolu Agency website contains only a portion of the news stories offered to subscribers in the AA News Broadcasting System (HAS), and in summarized form. "They are looking to increase our current measurement set…to somewhere close to 1 billion measurements," said NASA associate ISS scientist Heidi Parris.ĮMIT “really has the potential to close the gap in our understanding of Earth climate models." NASA currently has access to about 5,000 such measurements, a drop in the bucket of what is to come in the near future. Measuring the minerals in these samples will help researchers get a better grasp of their composition and role in global climate, such as weather pattern predictions, improved crop yields and other climate research. According to NASA, the device will be used to measure the mineral composition of dust in the planet's driest regions.ĮMIT will focus on how the dust from some of Earth's arid landscapes is carried on winds across the planet and how it affects the overall climate system in ways scientists do not yet fully understand. One of the mission's key experiments is the Earth Surface Mineral Dust Source Investigation (EMIT). The cargo capsule is scheduled to dock with the space station around 11.20 am EDT (1520GMT) on July 16. The Dragon will spend the next 36 hours catching up to the ISS in orbit. "So a really nice mix of fresh fruit for the crew." "We're sending up apples, oranges, cherry tomatoes, some onions, baby carrots, garlic, tahini, cheese and dry sausage," said ISS deputy program manager Dana Weigel.
The ISS crew will also be receiving a much-welcomed fresh food delivery. EDT (0044GMT) with a robotic Dragon resupply craft that will replenish the needs of the International Space Station (ISS).ĬRS-25 will deliver more than 5,800 pounds (2,630 kilograms) of science equipment and daily living supplies to the ISS, which will support more than three dozen ongoing research investigations. The rocket blasted off from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida at 8.44 p.m.
SpaceX launched its Falcon 9 rocket into orbit Thursday night for an important mission on its 25th flight, known as CRS-25.