The Soyuz MS-15 spacecraft carrying a three-member crew including Hazzaa AlMansoori arrived Wednesday for their mission aboard the International Space Station (ISS).
AlMansoori’s arrival makes the United Arab Emirates one of the 19 countries that have visited the ISS.
To date, the number of space travelers who have visited the floating laboratory reached 239.
The first Emirati astronaut was with NASA astronaut Jessica Meir, Oleg Skripochka of the Russian space agency Roscosmos in Expedition 61. Their spacecraft lifted off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, 5:57 p.m. local time.
After docking in the ISS, the Soyuz hatch was opened and station commander Alexey Ovchinin of Roscosmos, along with NASA astronauts Christina Koch, Nick Hague, Andrew Morgan, ESA (European Space Agency) astronaut Luca Parmitano and cosmonaut Alexander Skvortsov, welcomed the new residents.
Meir and Skripochka will spend more than six months on the station. Almansoori’s eight-day mission will come to an end when he returns to Earth Thursday, Oct. 3 on the Soyuz MS-12 spacecraft, along with Hague and Ovchinin, who are completing more than 200 days in space.
Currently, there are now nine people aboard the space station.
According to NASA, the eight days between the trio’s arrival and the departure of Soyuz MS-12 spacecraft will see the largest crew aboard the station since September 2015, when nine crew members were aboard for seven days during Scott Kelly and Mikhail Kornienko’s year-long mission.
