On Monday, September 11, the seven Expedition 69 crew members spent their off-duty day aboard the International Space Station (ISS). They will welcome three new crew members this weekend when they launch and dock with the orbiting outpost. Three future space station crew members are counting down the days from Kazakhstan's Baikonur Cosmodrome to launch aboard the Soyuz MS-24 crew spacecraft at 11:44 a.m. ET on Friday.
This is a beautiful view of the Earth captured from a window of the SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft as it approached the International Space Station. The picture below shows the Strait of Gibraltar, which connects the Atlantic Ocean to the Mediterranean Sea and separates the European and African continents. Image source: NASA
A trio of NASA astronauts Loral O'Hara, Roscosmos astronauts Oleg Kononenko and Nikolai Chub will dock with the Lasvette module more than three hours later at 2:56 p.m.
NASA astronaut and Expedition 69 flight engineer Frank Rubio works in the microgravity science glove box, exchanging graphene aerogel samples for a space manufacturing study. This physics research aims to produce a uniform material structure with superior properties that could bring benefits for power storage, environmental protection and chemical sensing. Source: NASA
The current Expedition 69 crew consists of two different crews, one of which has been on the space station for almost a year and the other which has been on the space station since August 27. The longest-serving crew members include commander Sergey Prokopyev, flight engineers Dmitri Petelin and Frank Rubio, who will leave at the end of this month after more than a year in space.
Today, Rubio surpassed NASA's single space flight record, which is the record of 355 consecutive days of space flight set by astronaut Mark Vandehei on March 30, 2022. At 11 a.m. on Tuesday, NASA TV will broadcast a pre-recorded space-to-ground conversation between Vandehei and Rubio on September 5, when he congratulated the orbiting astronaut on his record-breaking mission.
The space station's newest crew is entering its third week on a six-month mission in space. The four astronauts include NASA astronaut Jasmin Moghbeli, who took part in the first space flight, and Roscosmos cosmonaut Konstantin Borisov. in Borisov), as well as Satoshi Furukawa of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) and Andreas Mogensen of the European Space Agency (ESA), who visited the space station twice. They will conduct various microgravity science experiments in space for the benefit of humans living on and beyond Earth until the end of February.