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New Russian cosmonaut team arrives at International Space Station

18 March 2022 23:57 (UTC +04:00)

Three Russian cosmonauts safely arrived at the International Space Station (ISS) on Friday, docking their Soyuz capsule with the outpost for a mission that continues a 20-year shared Russian-U.S. presence in orbit despite tensions over Russia's invasion of Ukraine, APA reports.

The rendezvous came about three hours and 10 minutes after the Soyuz spacecraft carrying the new cosmonaut team lifted off from Russia's Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.

The docking, confirmed at 1913 GMT (3:13 p.m. Eastern time), took place while the Soyuz and space station were flying about 250 miles (420 km) over eastern Kazakhstan, according to NASA.

Soyuz commander Oleg Artemyev led the team, joined by two spaceflight rookies, Denis Matveev and Sergey Korsakov, on a science mission set to last 6-1/2 months. The launch was carried live by NASA TV and on the U.S. space agency's website.

NASA said it would take about two hours after docking for the crew to conduct standard leak tests and to pressurize the passageway to the space station before the three cosmonauts can open hatches to the ISS.

They will then join the station's current seven-member crew to replace three who are scheduled to fly back to Earth on March 30 - cosmonauts Pyotr Dubrov and Anton Shkaplerov and U.S. NASA astronaut Mark Vande Hei.

Vande Hei will have logged a NASA record-breaking 355 days in orbit by the time he returns to Kazakhstan aboard a Soyuz capsule with his two cosmonaut peers.

Remaining aboard the ISS with the newcomers until the next rotation a couple months later are three NASA astronauts - Tom Marshburn, Raja Chari and Kayla Barron - and German crewmate Matthias Maurer of the European Space Agency.

Those four crew members arrived together in November aboard a SpaceX Crew Dragon craft launched from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida to begin a six-month stint in orbit.

Launched in 1998, the research platform has been continuously occupied since November 2000 while operated by a U.S.-Russian-led partnership including Canada, Japan and 11 European countries.