
The hatch opening and greetings between the two crews will be streamed live over NASA TV.
The International Space Station has a new crew after NASA astronaut Shane Kimbrough and Russian cosmonauts Sergey Ryzhikov and Andrey Borisenko docked with the ISS early Friday morning. The crew arrived on a Russian Soyuz spacecraft after a two-day trip that started with the launch on Wednesday, a month after the Sept. 23 target liftoff date because of technical issues.
Soyuz connected with the ISS about 250 miles over southern Russia. This is the first spaceflight for Ryzhikov, the pilot of the spacecraft. Kimbrough and Borisenko have one spaceflight in their repertoire each.
They will be relieving the current crew of their duties: Russian cosmonaut Anatoly Ivanishin, the space station’s current commander, as well as NASA astronaut Kate Rubins and Japanese astronaut Takuya Onishi. The hatch opening and greetings between the two crews will be streamed live over NASA TV.
The new crew members will stay on station until February. They won’t have much time to adjust, as just two days after they arrived, an Orbital ATK Cygnus supply spacecraft is schedule to arrive at the station with more than 5,000 pounds of supplies. The spacecraft, which launched back on Oct. 17, had to take a long route to the station so it wouldn’t get in the way of the crew’s arrival.
“We look forward to all those vehicles arriving [and] taking them on the space station,” Kimbrough said at a news conference in July, as reported by Space.com. “It’s kind of like Christmas every time one shows up, because there’s a bunch of fresh food and new clothes and new equipment for us to work on.”
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