The International Space Station (ISS) Expedition crew 46-47 visited Red Square and the Yuri Gagarin museum at Star City, Russia on Monday (November 23) to cap off their training ahead of their launch next month.
The ISS crew of Russian Soyuz Commander Yuri Malenchenko, NASA Astronaut Timothy Kopra, and British Astronaut Timothy Peake lay flowers at the graves of Russian cosmonauts and toured the Kremlin.
The men said they were excited to participate in the expedition and were looking forward to carrying out some 250 experiments.
“The Space Station is now an orbiting laboratory, so there’s lots of work for us to do. Also, two of the transport vehicles that come on board will bring new elements to space station, both the beam, which is an inflatable module, as well as the international docking adapter, which sets the way a for us to have a standard for crew vehicles in the future. And of course all of us are well trained on the experiments on board, and we plan to be very busy,” Kopra said.
Peake said despite political differences between Russia and the West, the ISS remained a constant strength of international cooperation.
“The International Space Station really serves two main functions, and that’s scientific research, research for the benefit of people back here on earth, but also scientific research for future space exploration. And something else that’s really inherent in what we do in the International Space Stations is this international partnership which has really been so successful and so important over a long period of time,” he said.
Some of that research will involve metal alloys, protein crystals and human physiology experiments, Peake said.
In a video released on Monday U.S. ISS crew members Scott Kelly and Kjell Lindgren sampled the Thanksgiving dinner they will enjoy in the American section of the station.
“We’re thankful for the thousands if not tens of thousands of people at NASA and its contractor companies and all the international partner space agencies around the world that work so hard to keep us safe and make us so successful up here on the International Space Station,” Lindgren said.
The two showed off smoked turkey, au gratin potatoes, re-hyratable corn and candied yams placed on a floating tray before wishing everyone a good Thanksgiving.
The ISS 46-47 crew is set to launch on Dec. 15 from the Baikanour Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.
