Expedition 72 Crew Begin 6-Month Stay

NASA astronaut Don Pettit along with Roscosmos cosmonauts Alexey Ovchinin and Ivan Vagner arrived at the International Space Station (ISS) on September 11 at about 3:32 p.m. EDT.

Their Roscosmos Soyuz MS-26 spacecraft completed an automatic docking at the Russian module Rassvet after launching from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.

The three arriving crew members comprise Expedition 72 and will be aboard the station until spring 2025. They join 9 others on board for a 13-day handover period, during which the station will reach an occupancy of 12 residents. The members of Expedition 71 are NASA astronauts Tracy C. Dyson, Mike Barratt, Matthew Dominick, Jeanette Epps, Butch Wilmore, and Suni Williams, along with Roscosmos cosmonauts Nikolai Chub, Alexander Grebenkin, and Oleg Kononenko.

The twelve crew members comprise Expedition 71/72 until the departure of Dyson, Chub, and off-going station commander Kononenko. Their departure will complete a year-long stay for Chub and Kononenko and six months for Dyson, and mark the beginning of Expedition 72 on September 23.

Pettit, Ovchinin, and Vagner will perform scientific research while on the orbiting space station. This is the fourth spaceflight for Pettit and Ovchinin and Vagner’s second.

Two additional flights to the ISS will be conducted in the next six months, bringing two new crews. NASA’s SpaceX  Crew-9 is scheduled to launch in September 2024 followed by Crew-10 in February 2025.

FMI:  www.nasa.gov/