UAE astronaut, team on ISS welcome new crew of astronauts

UAE astronaut Sultan AlNeyadi and his crewmates welcomed the Crew-7 mission astronauts after their arrival to the International Space Station on Sunday.

The new crew arrived aboard Nasa and SpaceX's Dragon spacecraft, which blasted off on Saturday. The four astronauts are American Jasmin Moghbeli, Andreas Mogensen of Denmark, Satoshi Furukawa of Japan, and Konstantin Borisov of Russia.

The launch was pushed back to Saturday to give engineers an extra day to review a component of the Crew Dragon capsule's environmental control and life support system, Nasa said in a blog post.

The crew will spend six months aboard the ISS, where they will carry out science experiments including collecting samples during a spacewalk to determine whether the station releases microorganisms through its life-support system vents.

The goal of these experiments, which AlNeyadi and crew are a part of as well, is to understand if microorganisms can survive and reproduce in space. Another experiment aims to assess the physiological differences between sleep on Earth and in space.

The first segment of the ISS was launched in 1998, and it has been continuously inhabited by an international crew since 2001. Nasa earlier said AlNeyadi and his Crew-6 colleagues will return to Earth "no earlier than September 1".

The operations of the ISS are set to continue until at least 2030, after which it will be decommissioned and crash into the ocean. Several private companies are working on commercial space stations to replace it.

(With inputs from AFP)

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