A Russian Soyuz spacecraft carrying two astronauts and a NASA astronaut arrived at the International Space Station (ISS) today (September 15), about three hours after liftoff.
The Soyuz, known as MS-24, docked with the orbiting laboratory at 2:53 p.m. (1853 GMT) today, and the two aircraft had been in the air for 260 minutes. miles (418 kilometers) above eastern Kazakhstan.
That was just three hours and nine minutes after Soyuz MS-24 lifted off from the Russian-operated Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. It was a very short trip to the ISS. Not so record-breaking.
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On board the Soyuz MS-24 are NASA’s Loral O’Hara and Russian space agency Roscosmos’ Oleg Kononenko and Nikolai Chubut.
About two hours later, a hatch between the Soyuz and the ISS opened and the three astronauts floated into the orbiting laboratory.
O’Hara, Kononenko and Chubb will join seven other astronauts aboard the orbiting laboratory. The two astronauts will embark on a year-long ISS mission, with O’Hara scheduled to return home in six months.
While O’Hara and Chubb are new to spaceflight, Kononenko is very experienced. The astronaut has been in orbit for 736 days, with four different ISS missions before today’s launch. During his one-year stay, Kononenko will break the all-time record for time spent in space, 878 days, held by fellow cosmonaut Gennady Padalka.
The arrival of MS-24 begins movement toward departure from the ISS. On September 27, a Soyuz carrying cosmonauts Sergei Prokopyev, Dmitry Peterin, and NASA cosmonaut Frank Rubio is scheduled to return to Earth. By then, Rubio will have spent 371 consecutive days in space, a record for an American astronaut.
Editor’s note: This story was updated at 5:30 p.m. ET with news that the hatch between the Soyuz and the ISS has opened.