New ISS mission crew will pay more attention to biomedical experiments during their stay onboard the ISS, – Roscosmos cosmonaut Oleg Kotov who is a member of new ISS mission crew reported at the press-conference on Friday.
Together with another Russian cosmonaut Sergey Ryazansky and NASA astronaut Michael Hopkins he will go to the ISS onboard Soyuz TMA-10M manned spacecraft launched from Baikonur spaceport on September 26, 2013.Kotov has already been to the ISS twice, other crew members will go to space for the first time.
Institute for Biomedical Problems and Moscow State University made a lot of efforts to enrich our scientific program, – Kotov said. Hopkins added that during the mission the cosmonauts perform over 100 scientific experiments.
Kotov also reported that there will be only 3 spacewalks in accordance with Russian program. “During the first extravehicular activity apart from technical tasks accomplishment we will carry Olympic torch into the open space, another 2 activities will be devoted to station technical systems modernization and preparation of Russian ISS segment for reception of Russian Multipurpose Laboratory Module (MLM), – Kotov stated.
According to him MLM launch was shifted from December 2013 to April 2014. “That’s why our crew won’t see it. But we will perform certain operations on the reception of the module, -he added.