Yesterday, three new crew members arrived at the space station, two of them, Danny (who is recreating Ilan Ramon's experiment) and Kazakhi, will return to Earth in about a week along with the current station commander
Three astronauts and cosmonauts - Sergey Volkov from Russia, the Danish Andreas Mogensen from the European Space Agency and Aidan Imentov from the Kazakhstan Space Agency joined the 4th crew of the space station after they docked there yesterday. They join crew chief Gandy Padalaka, cosmonauts Oleg Kononenko and Mikhail Koryenko of Russia, Scott Kelly and Kyle Lingren of NASA, and Japan's Kimia Huey. This is the first time since 2013 that the station has nine staff members instead of six most of the time or three when there are changes.
In the past, during the replacement, it was customary to make an overlap of several days between the three astronauts who arrived and the three who are supposed to return to Earth, but this practice stopped in 2013 and since then they have switched to a method where the outgoing ones land first and a few days later the new crew members arrive.
One of the problems arising from the new practice is that it is difficult to carry out experiments, because in a skeleton team of three people, first priority is given to carrying out maintenance work at the station. The increased staff members will perform experiments in biology, biotechnology, physical sciences and earth sciences, including an experiment to observe "elves" led by Prof. Yoav Yair, head of the School of Sustainability at the Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya, As we first reported on the science website.
The journey allows the Russian space agency to rotate its cosmonauts. Volkov will stay at the station for the next six months and will return in March 2016 together with The two crew members who will have completed a full year in space by then - Kelly and Kornienko.
Padalka will be the one to return to Earth with the other two who arrived yesterday - Mogsen and Imtov. Kelly will be the one to be replaced as station commander in the 45th team. Kononenko and Yui will remain at the station until the end of December. Due to safety standards, the Soyuz spacecraft is not allowed to stay in space for more than six months.
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Gentlemen, history repeats itself, and once again we have reached the period of nonsense.
In the sixties the question was how many hippies could be pushed into a beetle, and the current version is how many astronauts could be pushed into a space station.
Is this Ilan Ramon's experiment with dust?
Because there happens to be dust now
Indeed, during the time of the shuttles, there were also ten or more astronauts on the station at the same time. This is about the period after 2011.
Have you already forgotten Ilan Ramon?
Kazakhstan succeeded in bringing an astronaut into space before Israel!