Soyuz TM-12 was the 12th expedition to

Mir ''Mir'' (, ; ) was a space station operated in low Earth orbit from 1986 to 2001, first by the Soviet Union and later by the Russia, Russian Federation. ''Mir'' was the first modular space station and was assembled in orbit from 1986 to ...

, and included the first

Briton British people or Britons, also known colloquially as Brits, are the citizens of the United Kingdom, the British Overseas Territories, and the Crown dependencies.: British nationality law governs modern British citizenship and nationality, w ...

in space,The mission report is available here: http://www.spacefacts.de/mission/english/soyuz-tm12.htm Helen Sharman.

Crew

Mission highlights

The Mir crew welcomed aboard Anatoli Artsebarski, Sergei Krikalev (on his second visit to the station), and British cosmonaut-researcher Helen Sharman, who was aboard as part of

Project Juno Project Juno was a privately funded campaign which selected Helen Sharman to be the first Briton in space. As the United Kingdom did not, at that time, have a human spaceflight programme (until the UK joined the human spaceflight elements of ...

, a cooperative venture partly sponsored by British private enterprise. Sharman's experimental program, which was designed by the Soviets, leaned heavily toward life sciences, her speciality being chemistry. A bag of 250,000

pansy The garden pansy (''Viola'' × ''wittrockiana'') is a type of polychromatic large-flowered hybrid plant cultivated as a garden flower. It is derived by hybridization from several species in the section ''Melanium'' ("the pansies") of the ge ...

seeds was placed in the Kvant-2 EVA airlock, a compartment not as protected from cosmic radiation as other Mir compartments. Sharman also contacted nine British schools by radio and conducted high-temperature superconductor experiments with the Elektropograph-7K device. Sharman commented that she had difficulty finding equipment on Mir as there was a great deal more equipment than in the trainer in the cosmonaut city of Zvezdny Gorodok. Krikalev commented that, while Mir had more modules than it had the first time he lived on board, it did not seem less crowded, as it contained more equipment. Krikalev also noted that some of the materials making up the station's exterior had faded and lost color, but that this had no impact on the station's operation. The spacecraft spent 144 days docked to Mir. While it was in orbit, the failed coup d'état against

Mikhail Gorbachev Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev (2 March 1931 – 30 August 2022) was a Soviet and Russian politician who served as the last leader of the Soviet Union from 1985 to dissolution of the Soviet Union, the country's dissolution in 1991. He served a ...

in August 1991 rocked the Soviet Union, setting in motion events which led to the end of the Soviet Union on 26 December.

In popular culture

'' Out of the Present'', a 1995 film documentary focused on cosmonaut

Sergei Krikalev Sergei Konstantinovich Krikalev (, also transliterated as Sergei Krikalyov; born 27 August 1958) is a Russian mechanical engineer and former cosmonaut and head of the Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center. As a prominent rocket scientist, he ...

's stay on Mir, features the arrival of Soyuz TM-12.

References

{{Orbital launches in 1991 Crewed Soyuz missions 1991 in the Soviet Union Soviet Union–United Kingdom relations Space programme of the United Kingdom Spacecraft launched in 1991