A Russian Soyuz spacecraft docked overnight from Saturday to Sunday at the International Space Station in order to serve, next September, as a vehicle for the return to Earth of two Russian cosmonauts and an American astronaut, whose initial spacecraft has been damaged.
The MS-23 rescue craft took off Friday morning from Kazakhstan, with no one on board, and reached the space station after a journey of about two days, according to a NASA live video broadcast.
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The American Frank Rubio as well as the Russians Sergei Prokopiev and Dmitri Peteline, took off at the end of September 2022 with the Soyuz MS-22.
But in December, this vessel suffered a spectacular leak while it was docked with the ISS, due according to Moscow to the impact of a micrometeorite.
The Russian space agency therefore decided that it could only be used in an emergency, and chose to send the MS-23 spacecraft as a replacement.
The mission of the three crew members has been extended until September, and they will therefore return on board this replacement ship after spending approximately a year in space.
The damaged MS-22 ship must be undocked from the ISS and return to Earth empty, a priori at the end of next month.
In addition to the three crew members who came aboard the Soyuz, the ISS currently has four other passengers, who arrived with a SpaceX ship and are members of the mission called Crew-5.
They are to be joined next week by Crew-6, which includes two Americans, an Emirati and a Russian, and is scheduled to take off Sunday night into Monday from Florida, United States.
After a handover of a few days, Crew-5 will descend back to Earth.
