Two days after blasting off from Kazakhstan, a Russian Soyuz spacecraft carrying an American astronaut and two Russian cosmonauts docked with the International Space Station on Friday, Nasa TV reported.
The spaceship with Nasa’s Shane Kimbrough and Russians Sergey Ryzhikov and Andrey Borisenko on board blasted off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan two days ago and completed the docking manoeuvre at 0952 GMT on Friday.
According to NASA, Soyuz MS-02 spacecraft docked with the station’s Poisk module at 5:52 a.m. EDT. At the time of docking, the space station and Soyuz were flying 251 miles over southern Russia.
As per reports, the hatches on the space station and Soyuz MS-02 were opened at 8:20 a.m. EDT, marking the arrival to the orbiting laboratory for the new crew members.
The three joined their fellow astronauts, Expedition 49 Commander Anatoly Ivanishin of Roscosmos and Flight Engineers Kate Rubins of NASA and Takuya Onishi of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, who have been aboard the space station since July this year.
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The new crew will spend a little more than four months together aboard the space station, returning to Earth in late February.
The crew members will contribute to more than 250 research experiments ongoing aboard the space station in diverse fields such as biology, Earth Science, human research, physical sciences and technology development.