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Soyuz MS-21 crew enters International Space Station

The flight to the ISS was carried out under the two-orbit scheme

MOSCOW, March 19. /TASS/. Russian cosmonauts Oleg Artemiev, Denis Matveyev and Sergey Korsakov left the Soyuz MS-21 spacecraft and entered the International Space Station on Satuday, according to a live broadcast of the docking by Russia’s state-run space corporation Roscosmos.

Currently the orbital outpost is crewed by Roscosmos’s Anton Shkaplerov and Pyotr Dubrov, NASA’s Mark Vande Hei, Raja Chari, Thomas Marshburn and Kayla Barron, and the European Space Agency’s Mattias Maurer.

A Soyuz-2.1a space rocket carrying the S.P. Korolyov spacecraft (Soyuz MS-21) with a crew of three blasted off from the Baikonur space center at 18:55 on Friday. The spacecraft was named after renowned Soviet spacecraft designer, founder of crewed space programs Sergey Korolyov.

The flight to the ISS was carried out under the two-orbit scheme. The docking was originally expected to be automatic, but later a decision was made to proceed in manual mode.

During the space mission the crew is to conduct more than 50 experiments in space biology and physiology, materials processing, cosmic ray physics and other fields. As Artemiev said, there will be seven spacewalks. One will be in cooperation with Italian astronaut Samantha Christoforetti, and all others with Denis Matveyev.

On March 19, Artemiev will get down to work in his other capacity - that of a TASS special correspondent in space. He will be the agency’s second envoy to the orbital outpost. His mission will be to keep the TASS audience abreast of latest news on the ISS and share photos and videos on the agency’s news resources.

On November 17, 2021 TASS and Roscosmos signed a memorandum on cooperation to open the agency’s office on the ISS. Roscosmos’s cosmonaut Alexander Misurkin was the first special correspondent in space. His mission lasted twelve days.

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