A Russian Soyuz spacecraft docked with the International Space Station overnight Saturday to serve as vehicle for the return to Earth of two Russian cosmonauts and an American astronaut whose original spacecraft was damaged next September.
The MS-23 rescue ship lifted off from Kazakhstan on Friday morning with no people aboard and reached the space station after a journey of about two days, according to a live NASA video feed.
The American Frank Rubio and the Russians Sergei Prokopiev and Dmitri Peteline launched the Soyuz MS-22 at the end of September 2022. But in December, that ship suffered a spectacular leak while docked with the ISS, which Moscow says was due to the impact of a micrometeorite.
The Russian space agency therefore decided that it could only be used in an emergency and decided to send the MS-23 spacecraft as a replacement.
The three crew members’ mission has been extended until September and they will therefore return aboard this replacement ship after about a year in space.
The damaged MS-22 ship must return to Earth undocked from the ISS and empty, a priori by the end of next month.
In addition to the three crew members who came aboard the Soyuz, the ISS currently has four other passengers who arrived on a SpaceX ship and are members of the mission called Crew-5. They are to be accompanied next week by Crew-6, which includes two Americans, one Emirati and one Russian, and is scheduled to take off from Florida, USA, Sunday evening into Monday.
After a handover of a few days, Crew-5 will return to Earth