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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