A Soyuz crew will lift off from the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on Tuesday, May 28. Their destination of Expedition 36/37 is the International Space Station and their mission will be to explore the effects of long-human habitation in space.
Members of the crew include Karen Nyberg of the United States, Luca Parmitano from Italy and Russian cosmonaut Fyodor Yurchikhin. While Yurchikhin is a veteran of the Soyuz program, Parmitano is a test pilot and Nyberg flew on NASA's Space Shuttle.
When the three space travelers get to their destination, they will find three ISS crew members already waiting in orbit for them.
The six team members aboard the ISS will have a busy schedule for their mission. Their appointed tasks include six spacewalks, docking with several supply ships and greeting one special guest. In November, the Olympic torch will head to space as an early part of the ceremonies marking the 2014 Olympics in Sochi, Russia, beginning in February 2014. It may even be part of a spacewalking mission.
Nyberg, who spent time aboard the ISS as part of a 14-day Shuttle mission in 2008, is looking forward to getting to spend more time aboard the space station than she did during her previous stay.
"In fact, there's a lot of that mission that I don't really remember. I look at pictures and I'm like, 'oh yeah, we did that,'" Nyberg said. "I think with a longer period of time, I'll have time to actually get it ingrained in my brain of where I am and what I'm doing, and I won't need to go back and look at those pictures to remember what it is that I've done."
Along with studying plant cultivation, one of the areas of research that will be investigated by the crew members during their mission will be the effects of long-term space travel on eyesight. Several people who have traveled in space for periods of time show degradation in eyesight during their missions.
It's not known exactly at this time what causes this... [W]ill it get worse as time goes on? So they're really starting to do a lot of experiments with us, taking images of the retina, taking pressures, getting eyesight checks throughout the mission," Nyberg said.
Parmitano is the first Italian to be sent on a long-duration space mission, and he will be studying how biofuels behave in zero gravity. Yurchkin will be the subject of a radiation study while he sleeps, to test exposure levels aboard the ISS.
This latest mission to the ISS is scheduled to launch just after 4:30 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time (EDT) on May 28, and will reach the space station about six hours later. The three new crew members will stay on the orbiting station until November.
