Crew-7 Arrives at the ISS, Preparing to Start 200 Experiments in Space

Crew-7 which is transported by Dragon from SpaceX (photo: dock. SpaceX)

JAKARTA - The Crew-7 mission, which blasted off from Earth on Saturday, August 26 at 3:27 am EDT, has arrived at the International Space Station (ISS) on Sunday, August 27 at 9:26 a.m. ET.

Using SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket, astronomers board the Dragon capsule which launches from Launch Complex 39A at the Kennedy Space Center, Florida, United States (US).

Docking confirmed for #Crew7! At 9:16am ET (1316 UTC), the Dragon crew spacecraft with four space travelers aboard arrived at the @Space_Station. pic.twitter.com/BbNX804voe

— NASA (@NASA) August 27, 2023

Dragon was carrying NASA astronaut Jasmin Moghbeli, European Space Agency (ESA) astronaut Andreas Mogensen, Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) astronaut Satoshi Furukawa, and Russian Space Agency (Roscosmos) cosmonaut Konstantin Borisov.

The four astronauts had to spend about 30 hours to get to the ISS. They will begin a six-month stint on the Earth-orbiting station, and conduct 200 scientific experiments in preparation for future missions to the Moon and Mars.

The experiments included the collection of microbial samples from the outside of the ISS, the first studies of human responses to different durations of spaceflight and investigations of the physiological aspects of astronaut sleep.

Crew-7 will join the ISS Expedition 69 crew consisting of NASA astronauts Stephen Bowen, Woody Hoburg and Frank Rubio, United Arab Emirates (UAE) astronaut Sultan Alneyadi and Roscosmos cosmonauts Sergey Prokopyev, Dmitri Petelin and Andrey Fedyaev.