Three American astronauts and a Russian cosmonaut arrived on the International Space Station (ISS) on Tuesday as part of the usual crew rotation aboard the flying laboratory.
• Also read: VIDEO | SpaceX is sending a new crew to the International Space Station
They will stay there for about six months and more than 200 scientific experiments are expected to be carried out during their stay.
They launched from Florida on Sunday evening aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.
On Tuesday, their capsule docked with the ISS and its hatch opened at 3:50 a.m. Eastern time (8:50 a.m. GMT), allowing them to enter the station with big smiles on their faces.
This is the eighth regular ISS crew rotation mission that SpaceX is conducting for NASA. Hence the name of their mission: Crew-8.
American Michael Barratt is the only Crew 8 astronaut to have visited the ISS. However, it is the first time for the Americans Matthew Dominick and Jeanette Epps as well as for the Russian cosmonaut Alexandre Grebionkin.
Seven people were already present on the ISS before their arrival.
After a handover period of a few days with the four members of Crew-7 – an American, a Dane, a Japanese and a Russian – they will return to Earth aboard another SpaceX capsule.
NASA and the Russian space agency Roscosmos, which jointly operate the ISS, have launched an astronaut exchange program in which each takes turns transporting a crew member from the other country.
This program was maintained despite the war in Ukraine and the ISS is now one of the very few cooperation partners between Washington and Moscow.