Context: Russian and U.S. space agencies have agreed to keep working together to deliver crews to the International Space Station (ISS) until at least 2025.
Russia has extended to use the ISS until 2028, an apparent reversal of an earlier announcement to quit the orbiting laboratory after 2024.
About International Space Station (ISS):
- ISS is a modular space station (habitable artificial satellite) and the single largest man-made structure in low Earth orbit (approximately 408 kilometres above the Earth's surface).
- Launched in 1998, it is a multinational collaborative project involving five participating space agencies:
- NASA (United States)
- Roscosmos (Russia)
- JAXA (Japan)
- ESA (Europe)
- CSA (Canada)
- It circles the Earth in roughly 92 minutes and completes 15.5 orbits per day, hosting a maximum of seven astronauts.
- It serves as a microgravity and space environment research laboratory in which scientific research is conducted in astrobiology, astronomy, meteorology, physics, and other fields.
- NASA intends to keep operating the ISS until the end of 2030, after which the ISS would crash into Point Nemo over the South Pacific Oceanic Uninhabited Area (SPOUA).