At 0136 GMT on 8 July 2016 the maiden launch of the new MS (Modernized Systems) variant of the Soyuz manned spacecraft was performed by a Soyuz FG launch vehicle lifting off from the Baikonur Cosmosdrome, near Tyuratam, Kazakhstan. On board the Soyuz MS-01 craft was a crew of three who were being carried to the International Space Station (ISS): Roscomsos cosmonaut, Anatoli Alekseyevich Ivanishin, NASA astronaut Dr. Kathleen Rubins and JAXA Astronaut, Takuya Onishi.
While more recent Soyuz flights have used the faster six hour approach to the space station, this flight is using the standard, two-day Station rendezvous orbit approach. It was thought that this first flight of the crewed MS series vehicle should use a two-day rendezvous to allow the crew to fully test all of the new systems.
Updated: The spacecraft docked with the Rassvet module of the ISS at 0412 GMT on 9 July 2016.
Compared to it predecessor the new MS version of the Soyuz carries more efficient solar panels and has a new Kurs NA approach and docking system. It also has additional micro-meteoroid debris shielding, and a modified docking and attitude control engine, and a new main computer, the TsVM-101. The new craft also has new telemetry system that allows signals to be relayed via satellite and provides the crew with positioning data when the spacecraft is out of range of ground tracking stations.
