In pre-flight quarantine,
Expedition 46 Flight Engineer Tim Kopra of NASA
answers media questions from behind glass during a press conference Dec. 14,
2015 at the Cosmonaut Hotel in Baikonur,
Kazakhstan.
Credits:
NASA/Joel Kowsky
|
Expedition 46 Soyuz Commander
Yuri Malenchenko of the Russian Federal
Space Agency (top) and Flight Engineers Tim Kopra of NASA
(center) and Tim Peake of ESA (bottom) wave farewell prior
to boarding the Soyuz TMA-19M rocket for launch on Dec. 15,
2015 at the Baikonur Cosmodrome
in Kazakhstan.
Credits:
NASA/Joel Kowsky
|
Hatches between the
International Space Station and an arriving Soyuz spacecraft opened at 2:58
p.m. EST Tuesday, signaling the arrival of three new crew members, including
NASA astronaut Tim Kopra. They will join other residents on the station to
continue important research that advances NASA's journey to Mars, while making
discoveries that can benefit all of humanity.
Kopra, Russian Federal Space Agency (Roscosmos) cosmonaut Yuri
Malenchenko and ESA (European Space Agency) astronaut Tim Peake launched from
the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan at 6:03 a.m. (5:03 p.m. in Baikonur) and,
after orbiting Earth four times, manually docked to the station at 12:33 p.m.
The arrival of Kopra, Malenchenko and Peake returns the station's
crew complement to six. The three join Expedition 46 Commander Scott Kelly of NASA and Flight Engineers
Sergey Volkov and Mikhail Kornienko of Roscosmos. During more than five months
on humanity’s only microgravity laboratory, the Expedition
46 crew members will conduct more than
250 science investigation in fields including biology, Earth science, human
research, physical sciences and technology development.
Kopra, Malenchenko and Peake will remain aboard the station until
early June 2016. Kelly and Kornienko will return to Earth at the conclusion of
their one-year mission
on March 1, 2016, along with Volkov. The pair will have spent 340 consecutive
days living and working in space to advance understanding of the medical,
psychological and biomedical challenges astronauts face during long duration
spaceflight, in addition to developing countermeasures to reverse those
effects.
Ongoing station research also includes the Microbial Payload
Tracking Series project, which uses microbial analysis techniques to establish
a census of the microorganisms living on surfaces and in the atmosphere of the
space station. Along with crew members and experimental payloads, the space
station is home to a variety of microbes, which are a cleaning nuisance and
potentially threatening to crew health and station equipment. Analyzing these
microbes can help determine whether some are more virulent in space, and which
genetic changes might be involved in this response. Results from the
investigation can be used to evaluate cleaning strategies, and to mitigate
microbe-related risks to crew health and spacecraft system performance.
The crew members are scheduled to receive several cargo spacecraft
-- including multiple U.S. commercial resupply vehicles from SpaceX and Orbital
ATK -- each delivering tons of food, fuel, supplies and research.
SpaceX will deliver on its eighth commercial resupply services
mission an important technology project that could help drive future
exploration. Developed under a public-private partnership, the Bigelow
Expandable Activity Module (BEAM) is an expandable habitat technology demonstration
for the International Space Station. Expandable habitats can greatly decrease
the amount of transport volume for future space missions, weighing less and
taking up less room on a rocket. These habitats have the potential to provide a
comfortable area for astronauts to live and work, as well as a varying degree
of protection from solar and cosmic radiation, space debris and other elements
of the space environment. Highly reliable habitation systems will be essential
to keep future crews healthy and productive in the deep-space environment
during missions in lunar orbit where the systems will be validated for future
missions to Mars that could last as long as 1,100 days.
For 15 years, humans have been living continuously aboard the
station to advance scientific knowledge and demonstrate new technologies,
making research breakthroughs not possible on Earth that also will enable
long-duration human and robotic exploration into deep space. A truly global
endeavor, more than 200 people from 15 countries have visited the unique
microgravity laboratory that has hosted more than 1,700 research investigations
from researchers in more than 80 countries.
For NASA TV streaming video, downlink and scheduling information,
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