New Cosmonaut Crew to Dock at Space Station

A Russian spacecraft ferrying two cosmonauts and South Korea?s first spaceflyer to the International Space Station (ISS) is on track for its planned Thursday arrival at the high-flying laboratory.

The Soyuz TMA-12 spacecraft is set to dock at an Earth-facing berth on the space station?s Russian-built Pirs docking compartment today at about 9:00 a.m. EDT (1300 GMT) to end a two-day orbital chase that began with a successful Tuesday launch.

Riding aboard the Soyuz are Expedition 17 commander Sergei Volkov, flight engineer Oleg Kononenko and South Korean astronaut So-yeon Yi, who plan to spend just over a week conducting experiments and swapping out the station?s current crew. All three are making their first spaceflight.

"The crew, including the Korean female astronaut, So-yeon Yi, are feeling well and all of them are coping normally with zero gravity," a medical spokesman for Russia?s space station Mission Control told the Russian Interfax News Agency.

Volkov and Kononenko will replace the station?s current Expedition 16 commander Peggy Whitson and flight engineer Yuri Malenchenko during a nine-day crew change aboard the orbiting lab. The third member of their crew, NASA astronaut Garrett Reisman, is already onboard the station as an Expedition 16 flight engineer and will stay on to join the new six-month mission.

?Usually, the handover is very busy,? said Volkov, a second-generation cosmonaut whose father Alexander flew missions to Soviet and Russian space stations in the 1980s and early 1990s, in a NASA interview.

The astronauts are due to open the hatches between their two spacecraft at about 11:50 a.m. EDT (1540 GMT).

Whitson and Malenchenko are wrapping up their own six-month mission and will return to Earth on April 19 with Yi, a 29-year-old mechanical and bioengineer who is visiting the station under a commercial arrangement between South Korea and Russia?s Federal Space Agency. Yi?s nearly 11-day spaceflight is packed with experiments and events to commemorate her role as South Korea?s first astronaut.

?Because the Korean cosmonaut is going to be with us ? we expect, from the Korean side, a lot of experiments,? Volkov said, adding that he and Malenchenko will likely participate in them. ?It [will] keep us, every time, busy.?

Selected from a field of 36,000 applicants, Yi was initially chosen as South Korea?s backup spaceflyer. She moved to the prime crew last month after the country?s astronaut frontrunner, artificial intelligence expert San Ko, was pulled from flight status by Russian space officials due to reading rule violations.

Yi has a dedicated science experiment program and has said she plans to share traditional Korean cuisine with her station crewmates and sing to them on April 12, which is celebrated as Cosmonautics Day in Russia to commemorate the anniversary of cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin?s 1961 spaceflight that inaugurated the era of human spaceflight.

Yi and the Expedition 17 crew are the latest new visitors bound for the space station.

Just last week, the Expedition 16 crew welcomed the arrival of the European Space Agency?s first unmanned Automated Transfer Vehicle Jules Verne, a massive cargo ship the size of a London double-decker bus. A week before that, the astronauts bid adieu to NASA?s space shuttle Endeavour crew after a record 12 days of joint construction work that delivered Reisman, a Canadian maintenance robot and a Japanese storage room to the orbital outpost.

?So it?s a very exciting time with lots of people coming and going as you can tell,? Reisman said in a NASA interview.

Russia's Interfax News Agency contributed to this report.

NASA will broadcast the docking of Expedition 17 with the ISS live on NASA TV Thursday, April 10 beginning at 8:30 a.m. EDT (1230 GMT). Click here for SPACE.com's NASA TV feed and live ISS mission updates.

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