Expedition 20 was the 20th long-duration flight to the
International Space Station
The International Space Station (ISS) is a large space station that was Assembly of the International Space Station, assembled and is maintained in low Earth orbit by a collaboration of five space agencies and their contractors: NASA (United ...
. The expedition marked the first time a six-member crew inhabited the station. Because each
Soyuz-TMA spacecraft could hold only three people, two separate launches were necessary:
Soyuz TMA-14 launched on 26 March 2009, and
Soyuz TMA-15 followed on 27 May 2009.
Soyuz TMA-15 launched from
Baikonur Cosmodrome
The Baikonur Cosmodrome is a spaceport operated by Russia within Kazakhstan. Located in the Kazakh city of Baikonur, it is the largest operational space launch facility in terms of area. All Russian Human spaceflight, crewed spaceflights are l ...
at 10:34 UTC on 27 May 2009.
The vehicle docked with the station on 29 May 2009, officially changing the Soyuz TMA-14 crew from
Expedition 19 to Expedition 20.
was the first commander of a six-member station crew, and the first commander of two consecutive expeditions (Expedition 19 and 20).
Nicole Stott was the final expedition astronaut to be launched on the shuttle.
During the expedition, Koichi Wakata performed a special experiment wherein he did not change his underpants for one month, in order to test a specially designed underwear without washing or changing; he reportedly did not develop body odor due to the effects of the special garment.
The station would not be permanently occupied by six crew members all year. For example, when the Expedition 20 crew (
Roman Romanenko,
Frank De Winne
Frank, Viscount De Winne (born 25 April 1961, in Ledeberg, Belgium) is a Belgian Air Component officer and an European Space Agency, ESA astronaut. He is Belgium's second person in space (after Dirk Frimout). He was the first ESA astronaut to comm ...
and
Bob Thirsk) returned to Earth in November 2009, for a period of about two weeks only two crew members (
Jeff Williams and
Max Surayev) were aboard. This increased to five in early December, when
Oleg Kotov,
Timothy Creamer and
Soichi Noguchi arrived on
Soyuz TMA-17. It decreased to three when Williams and Surayev departed in March 2010, and finally returned to six in April 2010 with the arrival of
Soyuz TMA-18, carrying
Aleksandr Skvortsov,
Mikhail Korniyenko and
Tracy Caldwell Dyson.
Crew
Backup crew
* Maksim Surayev, Commander
* Jeff Williams
*
Timothy Creamer
*
Catherine Coleman
*
André Kuipers
*
Dimitri Kondratyev
*
Chris Hadfield
Extra-vehicular activity
‡
denotes spacewalks performed from the ''Pirs'' docking compartment in Russian Orlan suits.
On 3 July 2009 expedition members undocked the Soyuz TMA-14 craft from the aft port of the Zvezda service module and piloted it over to the Pirs docking compartment. This was done to clear the way for the arrival of a Progress supply craft.
See also
*
Extravehicular activity
Extravehicular activity (EVA) is any activity done by an astronaut in outer space outside a spacecraft. In the absence of a breathable atmosphere of Earth, Earthlike atmosphere, the astronaut is completely reliant on a space suit for environme ...
*
List of cumulative spacewalk records
*
List of International Space Station spacewalks
*
List of spacewalks 2000–2014
References
External links
NASA's Space Station Expeditions page
{{ISS expeditions
Expeditions to the International Space Station
2009 in spaceflight