MONTREAL — Two Russian cosmonauts blasted off Thursday to the International Space Station with a new shipment that includes a part for the outpost’s high-altitude robot.
Cosmonaut Oleg Novitskiy, wearing a bright orange space suit, rocketed to the outpost from Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan with flight engineer Andrey Borisenko.
Borisenko, who will be returning to Earth, and four space station crew members are in orbit, part of the space station’s six-person crew.
The newly arrived module is now attached to the space station, but for several hours after the blastoff, it remained attached to the cosmonauts’ Soyuz capsule as Russian experts analyzed it.
A relief module, carrying all previously stored food and equipment, is scheduled to arrive at the station on Friday.
Also aboard the capsule that safely arrived, en route to the station, is an apparatus designed to steer the station’s robot arm and enable it to operate in the heavily polluted environment of space, without the need for spacewalks.
NASA astronaut Jack Fischer, Borisenko and NASA astronauts Serena Auñón-Chancellor and Kate Rubins, an Italian and an American, are holding the docked Soyuz spacecraft.