SpaceX’s Dragon, named Endeavor, docked at the International Space Station (ISS) complex at 2:28 a.m. EST on Tuesday with members of Crew 8 on board after a 16-hour flight.
Crew 8 members Matthew Dominick, Michael Barratt, Janet Epps and Roscosmos astronaut Alexander Grebenkin will be joined by NASA astronaut Jasmin Moghbeli and ESA astronaut Jasmin Moghbeli. He will be part of the 70th Expedition Expedition crew on the space station. Cosmonaut Andreas Mogensen, JAXA (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency) cosmonaut Satoshi Furukawa, Roscosmos cosmonauts Konstantin Borisov, Oleg Kononenko, and Nikolai Chubut.
For a short period of time, the total number of space station crew members will increase to 11, until the members of Crew 7, Moghbeli, Mogensen, Satoshi, and Borisov, return to Earth.
A SpaceX rocket lifted off from Florida on Sunday night with a crew of three U.S. astronauts and one Russian astronaut to begin a six-month science mission in Earth orbit. They arrived on their way to the International Space Station (ISS).
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The two-stage Falcon 9 rocket, carrying an autonomous Crew Dragon capsule named Endeavor, departed from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral along Florida’s Atlantic coast at 10:53 p.m. ET (Monday). It was launched at 3:53 a.m.
After Dragon links to the Harmony module, the astronauts aboard Dragon and the space station begin performing standard leak checks and pressurization between spacecraft in preparation for opening the hatch.
The mission, designated Crew 8, is the first since the private rocket venture founded by billionaire Elon Musk in 2002 and headquartered near Los Angeles began sending U.S. astronauts into orbit in May 2020. , becoming the eighth long-stay ISS team to fly by NASA aboard a SpaceX launch vehicle. .
Crew-8 will remain on the space station until the end of August, collectively conducting approximately 250 experiments in the microgravity environment of the orbital platform.
The ISS, the largest man-made object in space and as long as a football field, is continuously operated by a consortium led by the United States and Russia, including Canada, Japan, and 11 European countries.
(Information provided by agency)
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