Three
astronauts took a brief trip around the International Space Station (ISS)
Thursday to clear an orbital parking spot for an incoming crew and the next
tourist bound for the high-flying laboratory.
ISS
Expedition 14 flight engineer Mikhail Tyurin deftly guided his crew's
Russian-built Soyuz TMA-9 spacecraft to a berth at the aft end of the station's
Zvezda service module at 6:54 p.m. EDT (2254 GMT), ending a 24-minute trip that
began at a docking port 80 feet (24 meters) away.
"It
was nice and smooth, nice job," fellow Expedition
14 flight engineer Sunita Williams told Tyurin after the short flight. "Any
landing you can float away from is a good landing."
Clad
in their Russian-built Sokol spacesuits, Tyurin, Williams and Expedition 14
commander Michael Lopez-Alegria cast off from an Earth-facing docking port on
the space station's
Zarya control module at 6:30 p.m. EDT (2230 GMT) as both spacecraft flew 220
miles (354 kilometers) above the Pacific Ocean. Their destination port on the
Zvezda module was cleared Tuesday with the successful jettison of an unmanned
Progress 23 cargo ship.
A main battery glitch prompted the astronauts to switch to a backup system aboard their Soyuz vehicle before undocking, but had no other impact on brief spaceflight.
The
Soyuz move cleared the Zarya docking port for the anticipated April 9 arrival
of Expedition 15 commander Fyodor Yurchikhin and flight engineer Oleg Kotov,
who will welcome Williams into their crew and relieve Lopez-Alegria and Tyurin.
The
Expedition 15 cosmonauts are slated to launch April 7 from Baikonur Cosmodrome
in Kazakhstan with U.S.
space tourist Charles Simonyi, who will return with the Expedition 14 crew
on April 20. Simonyi is paying more than $20 million for his 13-day spaceflight
under an agreement between Russia's Federal Space Agency and the Virginia-based
firm Space Adventures.
Thursday's
Soyuz relocation marked the second orbital hop for the Expedition 14 crew.
Lopez-Alegria, Tyurin and then-Expedition 14 crewmate Thomas Reiter -- of the
European Space Agency -- performed a similar
docking port swap in October 2006.
"The
Soyuz relocation day is really a long day," ISS Expedition 14 increment manager
Melissa Owens told SPACE.com before Thursday's flight. "Effectively, you
lose about a week's worth of work to move that Soyuz."
Owens
said most ISS crews typically perform only one Soyuz relocation during a
mission, but Thursday's flight was added as a get ahead for the Expedition 15
crew. Without the flight, the Expedition 15 astronauts would have had to wedge
their own Soyuz mini-flight just after settling in aboard the station to make
way for an incoming cargo ship in May.
The
Expedition 14 crew has had some
spare time for extra science and ISS maintenance duties due to the delay of
NASA's STS-117 shuttle flight. Hail damage to the Atlantis orbiter's
external tank prevented a March 15 launch of the ISS construction mission, with
a new liftoff target expected to be announced on April 10.
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