Upon the completion of his mission, Williams will have spent the longest time in space among American astronauts, NASA confirmed.
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A Russian Soyuz rocket launched a joint U.S.-Russian crew to the International Space Station Friday (March 18), a space team that includes an astronaut aiming to break an American spaceflight record recently set by NASA’s year-in-space astronaut Scott Kelly.
Though this isn’t quite the full story: he’ll only be the record holder for astronauts – the real record holder is Genny Padalka, a cosmonaut, who has spent an astonishing 879 days in space.
The crew will reach the ISS six hours after launch, at which point the Soyuz will dock to the station’s Poisk module. For more than two decades with NASA, Kelly had at least four successful space missions under his belt.
A report published in the USA Today News said, “A NASA astronaut and two Russian cosmonauts are slated to launch Friday on a mission to the International Space Station that will set a record for cumulative days in space by a U”.
Williams is very priviledge to be part of the record book and said, “I feel very ready to be going back to the space station”. According to Straits Times, Williams will be joined by Russian cosmonauts Alexey Ovchinin and Oleg Skriprochka. The research is vital to selecting systems and designing procedures future crews of long-duration missions can use for fighting fires.
The other three astronauts now living on the orbiting global space laboratory are Timothy Kopra, Timothy Peake and Yuri Malenchenko.
The six continue the hundreds of experiments already on the space station, with a couple of new objectives.
The US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is planning to create the biggest man-made fire in space in order to study how fire spreads in microgravity environments. Out of an abundance of caution, the pod will rendezvous with the ISS to offload supplies first, then the Satfire module will be activated during the return trip to Earth. Live launch coverage will begin at 10 p.m. EDT on NASA Television and the agency’s website. It ferried Russians Alexey Ovchinin and Oleg Skripochka along with NASA’s Jeff Williams. That’s what NASA scientists are hoping to figure out by developing a space flight experiment that will test how fire behaves on a spacecraft after it leaves Earth’s atmosphere.
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When the ISS Expedition 47 crew members open the hatch, they will be greeted with a sign noting the spacecraft was named “SS Rick Husband” in honor of the STS-107 mission commander.
