The crew of the International Space Station (ISS) just went to nine yesterday as the Russian Soyuz spacecraft (TMA-18M)
docked at the station and Sergey Volkov of Roscosmos, Andreas Mogensen of the European Space Agency, and Aidyn Aimbetov of the Kazakh Space Agency stepped aboard. We are already a long way from earlier this year when we were worried about even getting supplies to the station after numerous rocket explosions. Since then, a
Russian Soyuz resupplied the station and just last week a
Japanese mission added more emergency supplies.
The NASA image above shows the ISS
configuration with all of the attached capsules. The Soyuz TMA-18M spacecraft
is docked to the Poisk mini-research module. The Soyuz TMA-16M
spacecraft is docked to the Zvezda service module. The ISS Progress 60
spacecraft is docked to the Pirs docking compartment. The Soyuz TMA-17M
spacecraft is docked to the Rassvet mini-research module. Japan’s
“Kounotori” HTV-5 is berthed to the Harmony module.
