On December 3rd, 2018, three astronauts went to International Space Station in Soyuz MS-11. These astronauts are Oleg Kononenko (Russian), Ann McClain (American), and David Saint-Jacques (French Canadian). Kononenko will be the commander and this is his fourth spaceflight, and McClain and Saint-Jacques are the flight engineers and it was their first spaceflight. McClain is on the left of the picture above, Kononenko is in the middle, and Saint-Jacques is on the left.
Expedition 58 patch
They were originally going to go to launch on December 20th, but two things changed the date.
Ovchinin and Hague, a Russian and an American astronaut, were heading towards the International Space Station in Soyuz MS-10 on October 11th. Two minutes into the liftoff, there was a problem. Resulting from a deformed sensor, the four boosters didn't separate properly. It hit the core stage, which was disastrous for the ship. Luckily, the escape system worked and the two astronauts landed safely on Earth, unharmed.
Since then, the Soyuz MS-11 has had four successful unmanned launches. Because Russia believed they had fixed the problem and the MS-10 and the crew of MS-10 hadn't gotten to the International Space Station, they decided to move the date of the MS-11 taking off to December 3rd.
They launched at 6:31 am ET, in Baikonur Cosmodrome, Kazakhstan, the world's largest space launch facility, which is currently leased to Russia until 2050. Their rocket was in space for six hours, four orbits, before docking to the International Space Station at 12:31 pm ET. They had to make sure the hatch seal properly before the two crews could meet.
The Expedition 58 crew had to wait two more hours before they could meet the Expedition 57 crew, Serena Au帽贸n-Chancellor (American), Alexander Gerst (German), and Sergey Prokopyev (Russian), who had been there since June. At 2:35 pm ET, the hatch opened and the crews met.
The three Expedition 57 astronauts get to go back to Earth on December 20, according to the NASA website. It is currently unknown when Ovchinin and Hague will get to the Space Station.
Expedition 58 will continue the experiments on biology, bio-technology, and physical science that the previous crew started, in the only permanently occupied microgravity laboratory.
Anne McClain, David Saint-Jacques, and Oleg Kononenko: https://www.inquisitr.com/5190070/astronauts-launch-international-space-station-december/
mission patch: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expedition_58
Soyuz pix: from https://www.space.com/42610-soyuz-rocket-launch-photos-return-to-flight-expedition58.html
Soyuz taking off: https://www.space.com/42610-soyuz-rocket-launch-photos-return-to-flight-expedition58.html
Two crews meeting (3):
Expedition 57: from NASA website
Expedition 58: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/the-latest-soyuz-with-3-astronauts-docks-with-space-station/2018/12/03/5e3e44e4-f726-11e8-8642-c9718a256cbd_story.html?utm_term=.791936b25661
Earth from International Space Station: from NASA TV
