A Russian spacecraft on a mission to bring back to Earth a crew stranded on the International Space Station (ISS) has docked at the station, Russian space agency Roscosmos said early on Sunday.
"Today at 03:58 Moscow time (00:58 GMT), the Soyuz MS-23 unmanned spacecraft docked to the Poisk module of the International Space Station in automatic mode," Roscosmos said.
The Soyuz MS-23, which lifted off from Baikonour space centre in Kazakhstan on Friday, is to bring back Russian cosmonauts Sergey Prokopyev and Dmitry Petelin, and US astronaut Francisco Rubio in September.
The three had been due to end their mission in March. They were left stuck in space after the cooling system of their Soyuz MS-22 capsule started leaking two months ago. The Soyuz MS-22 ship is now to be brought back unmanned next month.
Both Roscosmos and Nasa believe that the leak on the MS-22 spacecraft was caused by a micrometeoroid - a tiny particle of space rock hitting the capsule at high velocity.
