MOSCOW. March 19 (Interfax) - The crew of the Soyuz MS-21 crewed transport spacecraft has boarded the International Space Station (ISS), it was broadcast by Roscosmos.
After the air-tightness of the docking between the spacecraft and the ISS was verified, a transfer hatch was opened, and Roscosmos cosmonauts Oleg Artemyev, Denis Matveyev and Sergei Korsakov enter the station.
They were welcomed by the ISS crew comprised Roscosmos cosmonauts Anton Shkapletov and Pyotr Dubrov, NASA astronaut Mark Vande Hei, Raja Chari, Kayla Barron and Thomas Marshburn, and European Space Agency astronaut Matthias Maurer.
The carrier rocket took off the Baikonur Cosmodrome at 6.55 p.m. on Friday. For the first time since the ISS program was launched, the spacecraft carried three Russian professional cosmonauts. This is Artemyev's third flight to the ISS and the debut mission for Matveyev and Korsakov.
The spacecraft followed an ultrafast two-orbit rendezvous path to the ISS and docked at the Prichal module manually at 10.12 p.m.
The Soyuz MS-21 is the first crewed spacecraft to dock at Russia's Prichal new module.
The three cosmonauts will spend 195 days on board the ISS. Soyuz MS-21 commander Artemyev said earlier that the crew would perform six or seven spacewalks.