Space crew safe after danger avoided
Print Edition
A Russian Soyuz spaceship delivered a three-man crew, including Denmark’s first astronaut, to the International Space Station yesterday, a day after having had to maneuver to avoid colliding with space debris.
The Soyuz TMA-18M blasted off to the US$100 billion space laboratory from Kazakhstan on Wednesday to take Russian Commander Sergei Volkov, Kazakh cosmonaut Aidyn Aimbetov and Danish astronaut Andreas Mogensen into orbit.
Mogensen, dubbed “Denmark’s Gagarin” after the Soviet cosmonaut and first man in space, Yuri Gagarin, took Danish-made exercise bikes and 20 of Danish toymaker Lego’s plastic figures into orbit.
He and Aimbetov, Kazakhstan’s third cosmonaut, are due to return to Earth on September 12 along with Russia’s Gennady Padalka, who has been working at the space station since March. Padalka will have racked up a total of 878 days in space by then, longer than any other person.
Volkov will land next March together with NASA astronaut Scott Kelly and Russian Mikhail Kornienkoe who will have spent one year in space by that time.
It took two days to reach the space station, rather than the usual six-hour approach.
Russian space agency Roscosmos said last month the altitude of the ISS, lifted in July to avoid space debris, required the slower approach.
On Thursday, experts advised the Soyuz crew to make a maneuver to avoid colliding with the third stage of a Japanese rocket launched in 1989, Roscosmos said.
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