Article Posted on : - Nov 16, 2011

All six Expedition 29 crew members participate in a welcoming ceremony after the opening of hatches between the Soyuz TMA-22 and ISS. A NASA TV photo

MOSCOW (BNS): The Russian Soyuz capsule carrying a three-member space crew arrived at the International Space Station on Wednesday.

The Soyuz TMA-22 spacecraft, which was launched from the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on Monday, successfully docked with the ISS's Poisk mini-research module at 0524 GMT, NASA said.

Monday's launch was the first manned mission to the ISS after a gap of over two months following the August 24 crash of a Soyuz U rocket carrying an unmanned cargo craft on a supply mission to the orbital station.

The new crew -- Russian cosmonauts Anton Shkaplerov and Anatoly Ivanishin, and NASA astronaut Dan Burbank -- was welcomed aboard the orbital station by Expedition 29 crew members Mike Fossum (NASA), Satoshi Furukawa (Japan) and Sergei Volkov (Russia).

The six station crew members will have a little less than a week together as the Expedition 29 crew before Fossum, Furukawa and Volkov head home Monday aboard the Soyuz TMA-02M spacecraft that brought them to the station June 9.

Their departure will mark the beginning of Expedition 30, under the command of Burbank. A formal change-of-command ceremony is planned for Sunday, the US space agency said.

NASA astronaut Don Pettit, Russian cosmonaut Oleg Kononenko and European Space Agency astronaut Andre Kuipers are scheduled to launch to the space station on December 21, when they will join Expedition 30 as flight engineers.

The six crew members will carry out dozens of experiments during their time aboard the station.

Expedition 30 is expected to greet the arrival of Dragon -- a commercial resupply ship developed by private US firm SpaceX.

Dragon will perform a test flight and rendezvous with the station, to be followed by Cygnus, another commercial resupply ship.

Following the retirement of US space shuttles in July this year, the Russian Soyuz vehicles at present remain the sole means to ferry astronauts and cargo to the orbital station.