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Expedition 17 heads to the ISS |
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Written by Derek Kessler on
Tuesday, 15 April 2008
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 The 17th crew to man the International Space Station launched last week from the Baikonur Cosomodrome towards the orbital station. Aboard the Soyuz TMA-12 were Russian cosmonauts Sergey Volkov and Oleg Kononenko and South Korea’s first astronaut, So-yeon Yi. They launched from the Kazakhstan spaceport last Tuesday and docked with the ISS on Thursday.
Sergey Volkov is the son of famed Russian cosmonaut Alexander Volkov, making him the first second-generation spaceflyer. He will be the commander of Expedition 17 for the next six months. Oleg Kononenko will serve as the flight engineer for the same period. Yi is not only South Korea’s first astronaut, but is only the second Asian woman to fly into space. As part of a $25 million arrangement between Russia and South Korea, Yi will spend 10-days at the ISS. She will return with the Expedition 16 crew, Peggy Whitson and Yuri Malenchenko aboard the Soyuz TMA-11 currently docked with the ISS, on April 19th. Yi was chosen from a field of 36,000 applicants as the backup for Ko San, who was to be South Korea’s astronaut. After he violated reading rules during training in Russia, Ko San was removed and Yi took his place.
In preparation for the arrival of the Expedition 17 crew and their Soyuz craft, the current crew jettisoned a Russian Progress 28 cargo ship pack with trash from the station. The crew salvaged automated docking system hardware from the craft before undocking, and will bring it with them back to Earth. The unmanned Progress 28 craft piloted itself into a destructive reentry over the Pacific Ocean. While some debris from the 8-ton craft did survive the fiery reentry, it splashed down in rarely traveled waters about 3000 km east of New Zealand.
Volkov and Kononenko joined Garrett Reisman to complete the three-man Expedition 17 crew. Reisman has been aboard the ISS since the Space Shuttle Endeavour docked a month ago. The crew will help install the largest segment of JAXA’s Kibo Laboratory when it launches aboard the Space Shuttle Discovery late next month. They will also oversee the departure of the ESA’s Jules Verne cargo ship and will take part in at least one spacewalk.
Before the Expedition 16 crew departs at the end of this week, the six astronauts will share the space station. This period will allow the old crew to familiarize the new crew with the station and the progress of experiments currently underway. Yi also will prepare Korean food for the crew, a first for the space station, following the introduction of Japanese food during the last shuttle mission.
The next visitors to the space station will be the crew of the Space Shuttle Discovery, currently slated to launch on May 31st.
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