Mission Highlights
The Soyuz carried a crew of three to dock it with the Zvezda module of the International Space Station (ISS) at about 09:21 UT on November 2. The Progress M1-3 cargo craft that was docked with Zvezda was released to make way for the Soyuz. The crew of two Russian and one American spent over three months on the ISS, and returned to Earth in an American shuttle (STS-102) in February 2001. In the initial days, the crew brought a variety of life support systems on-line, and created a lap-top computer network that helped run all systems in the ISS. The remaining months were allotted for exercise and space endurance practice. The crew was first group of a planned decade-long "permanent inhabitation" of the ISS.
Read more about this topic: Soyuz TM-31
Famous quotes containing the word mission:
“Every Age has its own peculiar faith.... Any attempt to translate into facts the mission of one Age with the machinery of another, can only end in an indefinite series of abortive efforts. Defeated by the utter want of proportion between the means and the end, such attempts might produce martyrs, but never lead to victory.”
—Giuseppe Mazzini (1805–1872)