NASA announced that Astronaut Jack Fischer and Cosmonaut Fyodor Yurchikhin are heading to the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan for final preparations to join the International Space Station with an April 20 flight atop a Soyuz rocket.

US Astronaut Jack Fischer and Russian Cosmonaut Fyodor Yurchikhin are heading to the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan for final preparations to join the International Space Station with an April 20 flight atop a Soyuz rocket, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) announced in a press release on Tuesday.

"[The new] crew members... are in Russia finalizing their mission preparations," the release stated. "They will fly to Kazakhstan on Wednesday for ceremonial duties, check out their Soyuz MS-04 rocket and wrap up mission training."

Meanwhile, commander Shane Kimbrough and flight engineers Sergey Ryzhikov and Andrey Borisenko, who have been living in space since October 19, will enter the Soyuz MS-02 spacecraft on Monday to return to Earth, the release explained.

The departing crew is slated to land in Kazakhstan on Monday evening after 173 days in space, the release noted.

NASA's Whitson's Stay to be Extended at ISS by 3.5 Months - Roscosmos
A question of extending the stay of NASA astronaut Peggy Whitson on board the International Space Station (ISS) for another 3.5 months is almost solved, Russia's space corporation Roscosmos head Igor Komarov told Sputnik on Tuesday.

"The question of Peggy Whitson's stay at the ISS for another 3.5 months is almost solved, only some technical matters and formalities remain," Komarov said on the sidelines of the Space Symposium in Colorado Springs.

Whitson, along with Russia's Roscosmos cosmonaut Oleg Novitskiy and European Space Agency's Thomas Pesquet, docked to the ISS at on November 20, 2016.

In the end of March, Whitson set a world record for the most spacewalks done by a female astronaut - she has performed eight, and the most accumulated time spent spacewalking - 53 hours and 22 minutes.

Source: Sputnik News

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