March 25 (UPI) — Three astronauts on board Russia’s Soyuz MS-25 made it safely to the International Space Station nearly 250 miles above earth after a nearly two-day orbital journey.
The spacecraft — which carried NASA astronaut Tracy Dyson, Marina Vasilevskaya of Belarus and Roscosmos cosmonaut Oleg Novitskiy — docked at 11:03 a.m. EDT after a 50 hour trip from Kazakhstan, a former Soviet satellite state south of Russia that borders China.
Joining them at the space station are seven other crew members of Expedition 70 who already are in orbit.
Dyson is expected to spend the next six months as a flight engineer before her return in September accompanied by cosmonauts Oleg Kononenko and Nikolai Chub of Roscosmos, who will have ended their year-long space missions, according to NASA.
But Novitskiy, whose fourth flight to space this was, and Vasilevskaya who is now on her first, will be in space for just 12 days.
The two newly-arrived astronauts will return to earth in a parachute-assisted landing at a Kazakh base along with NASA astronaut Loral O’Hara, who will have had 204 days in space by the time she lands.