Russia\'s manned spacecraft docks with ISS

A Soyuz spacecraft carrying three astronauts aboard has docked with the International Space Station (ISS) Wednesday, said Russia\'s space agency Roscosmos. The ship docked with the orbiting station at 09:24 Moscow time (0524 GMT) in an automatic mode, nine minutes ahead of schedule, authorities said. The new crew to the ISS consists of Anton Shkaplerov and Anatoli Ivanishin from Russia and Daniel Burbank from the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). The new astronauts will join the current ISS crew, composed of the Russian Sergei Volkov, the Japanese Satoshi Furukawa and the American Michael Fossum, who have been working in orbit since early June and will return to the Earth on Nov. 22. According to Roscosmos, the new crew will stay in the station for 124 days, during which the crew members are expected to conduct 37 experiments and a spacewalk and celebrate the ISS\' 75,000th orbit of earth. The crew will also orbit a Russian-made Chibis micro-satellite, which studies gamma-radiation generated by lightning in the atmosphere. The Soyuz TMA-22 rocket with the new crew aboard was blasted off from the Baikonur space center in Kazakhstan on Monday. The launch of the Soyuz TMA-22 was initially scheduled on Sept. 22, but was postponed after the failed launch of Russia\'s cargo spacecraft Progress M-12M to the ISS. After the retirement of the U.S. shuttle fleet, Russia\'s Soyuz spacecrafts have become the only way for astronauts to reach the ISS at least until the middle of the decade.