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Putin to visit space museum, talk with ISS crew April 11

MOSCOW, April 10. /ITAR-TASS/. President Vladimir Putin will visit the Memorial Museum of Cosmonautics on Friday, April 11, to take a tour of its exhibition “Three Days from Gagarin’s Life” marking the 80th anniversary of his birth and talk with the crew of the International Space Station (ISS) via a videoconference, the presidential press service said.

Working aboard the ISS are a resident crew of Commander Koichi Wakata of Japan, flight engineers Mikhail Tyurin of Russia and Richard Mastracchio of NASA; and a visiting crew of flight engineers Alexander Skvortsov and Oleg Artemyev of Russia, and Commander Steven Swanson of NASA.

Putin will also meet with Giovanni Bignami, President of the International Committee on Space Research, who is in Russia as part of preparations for the Committee’s 40th Scientific Assembly to be held in Moscow in early August at Lomonosov State University.

The Moscow Memorial Museum of Cosmonautics was opened on April 10, 1981 to mark the 20th anniversary of Yuri Gagarin’s space flight. It features rocket replicas and satellites, personal belongings of cosmonauts, archival documents, numismatic and philately collectibles.

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