Astronauts arrive at International Space Station for exchange

The quartet blasted off from Florida on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket on Sunday night. (document)

United States Washington:

Three U.S. astronauts and one Russian cosmonaut arrived at the International Space Station on Tuesday for a six-month mission aboard the orbiting laboratory.

During their stay, they will take turns replacing departing crew members and plan to conduct approximately 200 scientific experiments.

The quartet blasted off from Florida on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket on Sunday evening.

A live broadcast of the docking showed the capsule docking with the International Space Station, its hatch opening at 3:50 a.m. ET (0850 GMT) on Tuesday, and the new arrivals smiling and hugging their colleagues.

This is SpaceX’s eighth standard International Space Station crew rotation mission for NASA, reflected in the mission name: Crew-8.

American Michael Barratt is the only Crew-8 astronaut to visit the space station. Americans Matthew Dominick and Jeanette Epps and Russian Alexander Grebenkin made their first stop on the International Space Station.

They join the seven crew members already aboard the International Space Station.

After a few days of transition, Crew-7’s four crew members from Denmark, Japan, Russia and the United States will return to Earth aboard another SpaceX capsule.

NASA and Russian space company Roscosmos, which jointly operate the International Space Station, have a cosmonaut exchange program in which they send astronauts to the outpost in turns.

Despite tensions over the war in Ukraine, the program has been maintained and the ISS is now one of the few areas of cooperation between Washington and Moscow.

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