The International Space Station (ISS) has welcomed its new crew. Crew-7, composed of astronauts from various space agencies, arrived at the ISS on Sunday aboard SpaceX‘s Dragon Endurance spacecraft, owned by Elon Musk‘s company.
During the 6 months that the astronauts will be on the space station, Crew-7 will be dedicated to conducting various scientific experiments on the effects of spaceflight on the human body over time. This information is of great relevance for future crewed missions to the Moon and Mars.
Crew-7 is composed of Jasmin Moghbeli, NASA astronaut; Andreas Mogensen, ESA (European Space Agency) astronaut; Satoshi Furukawa, JAXA (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency) astronaut; and Konstantin Borisov, Roscosmos (Russian space agency) astronaut.
Initially scheduled for August 25th, the launch of the Dragon Endurance had to be delayed by 24 hours to conduct a safety review of the valves in the spacecraft’s environmental control and life support system. After successfully passing the review, the Dragon Endurance was able to lift off on August 26th and arrived at the ISS the following day.
The astronauts will work while also participating in a series of experiments that will study human health in spaceflight. The program is called CIPHER, which stands for “Complementary Integrated Protocols for Human Exploration Research in Varied-Duration Missions.”
CIPHER includes 14 different experiments through which astronauts will investigate how spaceflights alter the human body based on their duration.
The program will collect data from up to 30 astronauts who spend different periods of time on the ISS, sharing their data before launch, during their stay on the space station, and after returning to Earth. This way, researchers can observe how the human body changes over that entire duration.
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