Live Briefing From Space on June 1  

It may get just a bit crowded, even with the recent expansion. The International Space Station crew is awaiting the arrival of three new members that will usher in an era of six-person crews aboard the orbiting laboratory. Russian cosmonaut Roman Romanenko, European Space Agency astronaut Frank De Winne and Canadian Space Agency astronaut Bob Thirsk launched aboard a Soyuz spacecraft Wednesday morning from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.

The Soyuz is scheduled to dock with the station Friday at 8:36 a.m. EDT. The trio will join station Commander Gennady Padalka and Flight Engineers Mike Barratt of NASA and Koichi Wakata of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) to form the Expedition 20 crew. It will mark the first time all five partner agencies are represented by astronauts on the station at the same time.

The expanded crew of the International Space Station will discuss the start of six-person operations in a news conference June 1st at 9:25 am. The news conference will be broadcast live on NASA Television and streamed on the NASA Web site.

Meanwhile, the Expedition 19 crew members worked with an array of science experiments aboard the station Wednesday.

Commander Gennady Padalka worked with a Russian experiment used for predicting natural and manmade disasters. He also spent time on an experiment that researches the growth and development of plants under spaceflight conditions in a special greenhouse facility.

Flight Engineer Mike Barratt worked with an experiment that studies the effects of long-duration space flight on crew member's heart functions and the blood vessels that supply their brain.

Flight Engineer Koichi Wakata completed another session with the Sleep-Wake Actigraphy & Light Exposure during Spaceflight (SLEEP) experiment that monitors the crew member's sleep and wake patterns.

FMI: www.nasa.gov