Article Posted on : - Jun 10, 2011

MOSCOW (BNS): Russian Soyuz TMA-02M manned spacecraft with three crew members on board has docked with the International Space Station.

The space capsule arrived at the orbital laboratory at 01:18 a.m. Moscow time (2118 GMT Thursday) and docked with Russia’s Rassvet docking port, federal space agency Roscosmos said.

The rendezvous and docking was in automatic mode, under the control of the MCC experts and the crew.

The spacecraft, carrying Russian cosmonaut Sergey Volkov, Japanese astronaut Satoshi Furukawa and US astronaut Michael Fossum, was launched by the Soyuz-FG rocket from the Baikonur spaceport in Kazakhstan on Tuesday.

With the arrival of the new crew members, the total number of astronauts in the space station has gone up to six.

The new staff joins station commander Andrey Borisenko, Alexander Samokutiaev and Ronald Garan who have been aboard the orbital lab since this April.

The crew will stay at the ISS until mid-November and witness US’s last space shuttle, Atlantis’s launch, scheduled for July 8.