Russian astronauts polish the ISS portholes from the outside

    March 27, 2015 at 22:43 the launch of the Soyuz TMA-16M manned spacecraft to the International Space Station from the Baikonur Cosmodrome will take place. Gennady Padalka and Mikhail Kornienko (Russia) and Scott Kelly (USA) will arrive on board. Kornienko and Kelly will spend a year aboard - this is the first flight to the ISS with an annual mission. March 15 was the planned training in the ship and the fitting of flight suits.

    As part of the expedition, Russian cosmonauts will polish the windows of the station outside to get rid of scratches received during the work.

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    Poster for the 43rd expedition to the ISS.

    In March, the State Commission approvedthe main and backup crews of the expedition scheduled for March 27. For the first time for the ISS, the flight duration will be 365 days. Earlier a year in space, Vladimir Titov and Musa Manarov spent at Mir station, and the record of 437 days belongs to Valery Polyakov.

    Gennady Padalka will spend six months at the station, after which he will become a champion in the total time spent in space - 900 days. For the first time, an astronaut, as the commander of a spaceship, flew to the Mir orbital station, where he stayed for more than 198 days from August 1998 to February 1999. Then several flights to the ISS followed. The Russian astronaut made 8 spacewalks with a total duration of about 32 hours.

    For Mikhail Kornienko, this will be the third expedition to the ISS. Behind it is one spacewalk lasting 6 hours 43 minutes. The American astronaut Scott Kelly will go aboard the station for the fourth time, in three flights he spent 180 days in space.

    As part of the expedition, Russian cosmonauts will perform an unusual task: one of the spacewalks in mid-June will be devoted to cleaning and polishing the station’s windows outside. Cosmonauts use technology developed at Tomsk Polytechnic University and RSC Energia. A multilayer nanostructured coating will be applied to the glass, which should protect them from space debris.

    On March 15, as part of the training, the main and backup crews tried on suits and checked spacesuits, studied scientific styling, and trained with laser rangefinders and satellite phones, Interfax reports .

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    The main and backup crews: Mikhail Kornienko, Gennady Padalka, Scott Kelly, Sergey Volkov, Alexey Ovchinin, Jeffrey Williams.
    Photo: Natalya Trostyanskaya


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    “Waiting for the train, the train that will send me far,” Scott Kelly writes on his Facebook page .

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