Spacecraft with Pole aboard docks with ISS
The Dragon capsule carrying a four-member crew, including the Polish astronaut, Slawosz Uznanski-Wisniewski, has arrived at the International Space Station (ISS).
The capsule docked with the ISS at 12:21pm CET on Thursday. The hatch was opened approximately two hours later, and the four astronauts, comprising Uznanski-Wisniewski, Peggy Whitson from the US, Shubhanshu Shukla from India, and Tibor Kapu of Hungary, boarded the ISS at 2.25pm CET and were welcomed by the seven ISS residents.
Whitson, the Axiom mission commander, gave Uznanski-Wisniewski a badge with the number 635, signifying the 635th person in space.
The docking completed the international crew's journey to the ISS, which lasted approximately 28 hours. It began at 8:31am CET on Wednesday at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida with the lift-off of the Falcon 9 space rocket carrying the Dragon capsule into Earth's orbit.
The spaceflight under the Axiom 4 mission has been coordinated by the US space agency NASA, US space infrastructure developer Axiom Space, and US billionaire Elon Musk's SpaceX, which provided the Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon spacecraft. Uznanski-Wisniewski's participation in the Ax-4 mission follows a 2023 agreement between Poland's Ministry of Development and Technology and the European Space Agency to carry out the IGNIS scientific mission to the ISS.
While at the ISS, the Polish astronaut is to carry out 13 experiments. (PAP) wpb/jch/jd/mf
