A Russian Soyuz MS-25 spacecraft has arrived aboard the International Space Station with three astronauts on Monday, March 25, at 11:03 a.m. EDT (15:03 UTC).
The spacecraft docked at the Prichal module of the International Space Station.
It carried NASA astronaut Tracy Dyson, Roscosmos cosmonaut Oleg Novitsky, and spaceflight participant Marina Vasilevskaya of Belarus.
Through this mission, Marina Vasilevskaya becomes the first Belarusian to go into space as well as to the International Space Station (ISS).
The hatches between the International Space Station and the newly arrived Soyuz MS-25 spacecraft opened around two hours after docking on Monday, March 25, at 1:26 p.m. EDT (17:26 UTC).
The spacecraft launched on Saturday, March 23, at 8:36 a.m. EDT (12:36 UTC) from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.
The arrival of three new crew members to the already existing seven crew members aboard the International Space Station temporarily increases the station’s population to 10.
NASA astronaut Tracy C. Dyson, Roscosmos cosmonaut Oleg Novitskiy, and spaceflight participant Marina Vasilevskaya of Belarus joined NASA astronauts Loral O’Hara, Matthew Dominick, Mike Barratt, and Jeanette Epps, as well as Roscosmos cosmonauts Oleg Kononenko, Nikolai Chub, and Alexander Grebenkin, already living and working aboard the space station.
NASA astronaut Tracy Dyson will spend six months aboard the station and will do microgravity research. She will return to Earth in September with Roscosmos cosmonauts Oleg Kononenko and Nikolai Chub.
However, Roscosmos cosmonaut Oleg Novitsky and spaceflight participant Marina Vasilevskaya of Belarus will spend around two weeks on the space station and will return to Earth with NASA astronaut Loral O’Hara on Saturday, April 6, on a Soyuz MS-24 spacecraft that was previously attached to the space station.
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