BAIKONUR. June 6 (Interfax-AVN) - The State Commission at Baikonur space center has approved the crew that will leave on June 8 for a five-month mission to the International Space Station (ISS) on the upgraded spacecraft Soyuz TMA-02M, an Interfax-AVN correspondent reports.
The crew consists of Russian cosmonaut Sergei Volkov, JAXA astronaut Satoshi Furukawa and NASA astronaut Michael Fossum. Oleg Kononenko (Russia), Andre Kuipers (the Netherlands) and Donald Pettit (USA) will be the standby crew.
The takeoff of the Soyuz-FG launch vehicle with the Soyuz TMA-02M spacecraft from the Gagarin launch pad in Baikonur is scheduled for 00:13 a.m. Moscow time on June 8.
Soyuz TMA-02M is the second spacecraft for human missions in the new series. It was developed and built at Energia rocket and space corporation near Moscow on the basis of Soyuz TMA vehicles that have made 21 space flights since October 2002.
The new spacecraft has a new onboard movement control and navigation system (the outdated Argon-16 computer system was replaced by a modern digital TsVM-101 computer) and a new onboard measuring system (an analog telemetric system was replaced a computerized digital telemetric system).