Soyuz rocket is rolled out for Sept 26 launch

The Soyuz rocket is rolled out to the launch pad by train on Monday, Sept. 23, 2013, at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. Launch of the Soyuz rocket is scheduled for Sept. 26 and will send Expedition 37 Soyuz Commander Oleg Kotov, NASA Flight Engineer Michael Hopkins and Russian Flight Engineer Sergei Ryazansky on a five-and-a-half month mission aboard the International Space Station.

Michael Hopkins of NASA and Oleg Kotov and Sergey Ryazanskiy of the Russian Federal Space Agency (Roscosmos) will depart from the Baikonur Cosmodrome at 4:58 p.m. EDT (2:58 a.m. Kazakh time Sept. 26) aboard a Soyuz spacecraft headed for the space station. Hopkins and Ryazanskiy are flight engineers, and Kotov commands the Soyuz spacecraft, which will rendezvous with the space station and dock after four orbits of Earth. Docking to the Poisk module on the Russian segment of the station will take place at 10:47 p.m.

At about 12:25 a.m. Sept. 26, hatches between the Soyuz and the space station will open. Expedition 37 Commander Fyodor Yurchikhin of Roscosmos, as well as Flight Engineers Karen Nyberg of NASA and Luca Parmitano of the European Space Agency will greet Hopkins, Kotov and Ryazanskiy. Hopkins, Kotov and Ryazanskiy will remain aboard the station until mid-March. Yurchikhin, Nyberg and Parmitano, who have been aboard the orbiting laboratory since late May, will return to Earth Nov. 11, leaving Kotov as commander of Expedition 38.