The International Space Station ( ISS ) hasjust receivedits new crew members that will abide on the orbit laboratory for the next few month . They are NASA astronaut Kate Rubins , Russian spaceman Anatoly Ivanishin , and JAXA spaceman Takuya Onishi .
The three launched last Wednesday and arrived on Saturday , July 9 , at 2.26am EDT ( 7.26am BST ) . They move to the station on Russia ’s new Soyuz MS-01 spacecraft , anupgraded versionof the previous Soyuz vehicle . On the ISS , they join Commander Jeff Williams of NASA , as well as Flight Engineers Oleg Skripochka and Alexey Ovchinin of Roscosmos .
Their foreign mission will be part of Expedition 48 and 49 on the ISS . The three new crew member will remain on the ISS until late October , while the other three will start out in September .
So , who are the new arrivals ? Well , let ’s take a spirit .
A arresting shaft of photographer snapping the Soyuz launch on Wednesday . NASA / Bill Ingalls
Kathleen “ Kate ” Rubins , aged 37 , became a NASA astronaut in July 2009 . Born in Connecticut , US , she is a microbiologist by trade but is now undertaking her first mission to blank space , where she will do the first DNA sequencing on the ISS . Rubins is the 60th fair sex to go to space ; when she was born , only one – the Soviet Union ’s Valentina Tereshkova – had done so .
Cosmonaut Anatoly Ivanishin , meanwhile , is slenderly more experient . This is his second flight to the ISS , having locomote on Expedition 29/30 in 2011 and 2012 . He formally became a cosmonaut in 2005 , having educate since 2003 , and has a background in the military as a pilot . Aged 47 , he was born in Irkutsk , Russia , on January 15 , 1969 .
For Japanese spaceman Takuya Onishi ( aged 40 ) , like Rubins , this is also his first flying . Selected in 2009 , he was bear on December 22 , 1975 , in Tokyo , Japan . The former archetype is the 11th Japanese astronaut togo to space , and on the ISS he will conduct enquiry inside Japan ’s Kibo laboratory , alongside other job .
Interestingly , we are moving towards the end of the period where the ISS only has six crew members . Next year , SpaceX ’s Crew Dragon ballistic capsule is expected to takeits first astronauts – and eventually , it will take four people on each flight of stairs , increasing the content of the station to seven ( alongside three on a Soyuz space vehicle ) .
Above , the three new work party on the ISS unite their new colleagues . NASA TV
