Russian spaceship Soyuz Docks with ISS

Russia’s manned spaceship Soyuz TMA-12M with a new international crew of a long-duration expedition to the International Space Station (ISS), the ISS-39/40 mission, has docked with the Station on Friday, bringing Russian cosmonauts Alexander Skvortsov and Oleg Artemyev, and American astronaut Steve Swanson to orbit. “The spaceship moored at the docking assembly of the Russian module Poisk (MIM-2) at 03:53, Moscow time, in an automatic mode,” an official at the Flight Control Center (FCC) outside Moscow told Russian Itar-Tass news agency.The arrivals floated through open hatches into the orbital station at 06:47 and were welcomed aboard by Mikhail Tyurin, Koichi Wakata, and Richard Mastracchio. All the crew members are feeling well, the FCC official added. The ISS crew membership has grown up to six. They all will be working together aboard the Station until May.The ISS-39/40 mission will work in orbit for the planned 169-day period, during which the crew is to do a large amount of work, receive several resupply spacecraft and carry out extensive scientific research which includes 49 experiments under the Russian program and about 170 ones under the American one. Besides, during a spacewalk scheduled for August, the Russian cosmonauts are to launch a Peruvian minisatellite.The spaceship Soyuz TMA-12M was launched from Baikonur on March 26 at 01:17, Moscow time. Originally, it was expected that the crew would be brought to the ISS in accordancewith a short six-hour diagram. However, due to complications that arose in the operation of the spaceship’s orientation system, a decision was made to switch over to a 48-hour diagram for docking.