09 October 2007
The International Space Station Credit: NASA
The crew of the International Space Station Expedition 16 are scheduled to launch from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on 10 October 2007 to begin a six-month stay aboard the orbiting outpost.
The crew consists of Commander Peggy Whitson, Soyuz Commander and Flight Engineer Cosmonaut Yuri Malenchenko and the first Malaysian astronaut Sheikh Muszaphar Shukor. Shukor, 35, is a medical doctor. He is making the spaceflight under contract with the Russian Federal Space Agency. He will return to Earth with the Expedition 15 crew, Commander Fyodor Yurchikhin and Flight Engineer Oleg Kotov, on 21 October 2007.
The crew will fly to the International Space Station (ISS) onboard the Soyuz spacecraft, nicknamed "space taxi". The flight will last about two days.
Whitson is on her second mission to ISS. She served as a flight engineer in Expedition 5, in 2002, when she stayed almost 185 days aboard ISS. She is a biochemistry PhD. She began working with NASA as a research biochemist in 1989 and was selected as an astronaut in 1996.
Expedition 16 will be the third prolonged spaceflight for Russian Air Force Colonel Malenchenko. He spent 126 days aboard the Russian space station Mir in 1994, and commanded the two-crewmembers Expedition 7, spending 185 days in space in 2003. He also was a member of the crew of the Space Shuttle Atlantis on an almost-12-day mission to the ISS in 2000.
Further Reading
Expedition 16
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/expeditions/expedition16/index.html
Aymen Mohamed Ibrahem
Senior Astronomy Specialist