NASA
formally announced the next crew bound for the International Space Station
(ISS) Thursday, a two-astronaut team set to launch in mid-March aboard a
Russian Soyuz spacecraft.
Veteran cosmonaut
Pavel Vinogradov, with Russia's Federal Space Agency, will command the ISS
Expedition 13 mission with U.S. astronaut Jeffrey Williams serving as both
flight engineer and NASA science officer.
Also
launching toward the ISS with the Expedition 13 crew will be Brazilian Air
Force Lt. Col. Marcos
Pontes, Brazil's first astronaut slated to fly in space. Pontes is expected
to spend about one week performing experiments aboard the ISS before returning
to Earth with the station's current crew.
Vinogradov
is a veteran of one previous long-duration spaceflight aboard Russia's Mir
Space Station in 1997, while Williams, a U.S. Army colonel, served as a mission
specialist aboard NASA's Atlantis orbiter during the 10-day STS-101
flight in May 2000.
Both men
will be onboard the ISS in May, when the current launch window opens for NASA's
STS-121 shuttle flight aboard Discovery, NASA officials have said.
The STS-121
test flight, NASA's second post-Columbia
accident shuttle mission, is expected to deliver European astronaut Thomas
Reiter to the ISS, though the flight is pending the resolution of shuttle
fuel tank foam issues. Reiter has been tapped as the first long-duration
astronaut to be stationed aboard the ISS by the European Space Agency.
Vinogradov
and Williams will replace the space station's current crew, ISS
Expedition 12 commander Bill McArthur and flight engineer Valery Tokarev,
who have lived aboard the space station since October
2005. McArthur and Tokarev cleared the midpoint of their six-month
expedition this week.
At about
3:00 a.m. EST (0800 GMT) today, Tokarev responded to a false fire alarm inside
the station's Russian-built Zvezda service module, NASA spokesperson Rob Navias
told SPACE.com.
"All the
systems were checked [and] there was no data to suggest anything out of the
ordinary," Navias said, adding that similar false alarms have occurred in the
past in both the U.S. and Russian segments of the ISS.
McArthur,
Tokarev and Pontes are expected to return to Earth in early April aboard their
Soyuz TMA-7 spacecraft.
Russian Soyuz spacecraft have proven vital for transporting astronaut crews to and from the space station. The dependable vehicles were the only spacecraft to ferry astronauts into Earth orbit during the two and one-half years NASA spent recovering from the 2003 Columbia accident. NASA's Discovery shuttle visited the ISS in July-August 2005 during the STS-114 mission, which marked the U.S. space agency's first post-Columbia spaceflight.
Earlier today, SPACE.com reported that NASA has struck a $44 million deal with Russia's Federal Space Agency to purchase additional Soyuz rides to the ISS for future U.S. astronauts. A previous bilateral agreement, in which Russia accomodated U.S. astronauts aboard Soyuz vehicles, expired with the Expedition 12 crew's launch last fall.
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