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Wakata starts lengthy stay at space station after Discovery dock+(Japan Economic Newswire Via Acquire Media NewsEdge) HOUSTON, Texas, March 17_(Kyodo) _ Japanese astronaut Koichi Wakata began his stay of three and an half months at the International Space Station Tuesday, after moving from the U.S. space shuttle Discovery that docked at the ISS earlier in the day. Wakata, 45, is the first Japanese to live at the space station, a research facility orbiting at an altitude of 400 kilometers in a joint project involving 16 countries. Until the end of June, he will conduct various experiments there and provide his own data for study on the influence of life in space on the human body. After the hatches between the space shuttle and the ISS, space station commander Mike Fincke and flight engineers Sandra Magnus and Yury Lonchakov welcomed Discovery commander Lee Archambault and his six crewmembers, including Wakata. Wakata will be formally trading places with U.S. astronaut Magnus, who is scheduled to return to Earth on the shuttle. He will live at the space station with Fincke, an American, and Russian astronaut Lonchakov for the time being. The crew at the orbiting outpost is scheduled to increase from three to six in May after a new water-recycling system, designed to convert astronauts' urine into drinking water, begins working. Wakata is scheduled to return to Earth at the end of June on a U.S. shuttle, after completing Japan's "Kibo" laboratory module attached to the ISS by connecting a facility for experiments outside the space station to Kibo. Discovery arrived at the ISS two days after lifting off from Florida's Kennedy Space Center on a mission to deliver to the space station the final set of solar arrays needed to complete its complement of electricity-generating solar panels. Copyright ? 2009 Kyodo News International, Inc. |