Today, Friday, September 15, at 11:44 a.m. EST, mission managers have approved the Soyuz MS-24 spacecraft’s launch of three new crew members to the International Space Station. NASA astronaut Loral O'Hara and Roscosmos astronauts Oleg Kononenko and Nikolai Chub will board the Soyuz crew spacecraft and dock with the Lasvette module at 2:56 p.m. more than three hours later.
A Soyuz rocket is transported by train to launch pad 31 at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on Tuesday, September 12, 2023. NASA's Expedition 70 astronaut Loral O'Hara and Roscosmos astronauts Oleg Kononenko and Nikolai Chub are scheduled to launch aboard the Soyuz MS-24 spacecraft on September 15. Image credit: NASA/Bill Ingalls
arrival and integration
Expedition 69 commander Sergey Prokopyev and flight engineer Dmitri Petelin will be on duty Friday to monitor the arrival of the new Soyuz. After the new crew is docked and after leak and pressure checks, Prokopiev will open the space station's Lasvet hatch, and Kononenko and Chubb will open the Soyuz hatch. The new trio will enter the orbiting outpost, undergo a welcome ceremony with space station staff, attend a safety briefing, and begin a six-month space research mission.
Preparatory activities
Prokopiev and Petrin continued preparations for the arrival of the new trio on Thursday, setting up the crew module for the new cosmonauts inside the Roscosmos section of the orbiting laboratory. NASA flight engineer Frank Rubio will set up new crew quarters for O'Hara in the Columbus laboratory module ahead of her arrival on Friday.
A Soyuz rocket is transported by train to launch pad 31 at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on Tuesday, September 12, 2023. NASA's Expedition 70 astronaut Loral O'Hara and Roscosmos astronauts Oleg Kononenko and Nikolai Chub are scheduled to launch aboard the Soyuz MS-24 spacecraft on September 15. Image credit: NASA/Bill Ingalls
About to leave
Prokopiev, Petrin and Rubio are also preparing to return to Earth on September 27 aboard the Soyuz MS-23 spacecraft. The two astronauts have been testing lower-body negative pressure suits that may help their bodies adjust to Earth's gravity more quickly after living in weightlessness for more than a year. When Rubio lands with the Soyuz astronauts, he will set the record for the longest single space flight by a NASA astronaut (371 days), surpassing astronaut Mark Vanderhei's record of 355 days.
scientific adventure
On Thursday, Rubio joined several astronauts from the 69th Expedition to participate in the Vascular Aging Study, collecting blood, urine and saliva samples for analysis. Rubio, along with astronauts Jasmine Mogbeli, Andreas Mogensen and Satoshi Furukawa, assisted each other in drawing blood. NASA's Mohberg spins the samples in a centrifuge at the end of the study and then places them in a scientific freezer.
Other activities
Mogensen of the European Space Agency (ESA) later received training at the Columbus laboratory to operate the Canadarm2 robotic arm and repair laptops. Furukawa from the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) prepared food and drinks for the arriving astronauts and collected water samples from the "Hope" experimental module for analysis.
Roscosmos cosmonaut Konstantin Borisov spent the first half of the day mainly engaged in maintenance work on orbital pipelines and electronic equipment. In the afternoon, he checked the video hardware and laptop.