Log on to any social media or chat forum that has Mumbai based users, and you're likely to find at least a few people complaining about the traffic snarls that block their way. Residents of the city often have to traverse long distances to reach their places of work (or leisure), and it is not uncommon for people to bemoan the fact that they are "stuck in traffic".
The infamous Mumbai traffic can at times see people move mere metres at a time, spending several hours everyday in their efforts to travel. Towards the end of September for example, a Twitter user had narrated a traffic horror story, that allegedly saw her take three hours to cover a distance of 1 km.
In that same amount of time, on Wednesday, a Soyuz spacecraft carrying NASA astronaut Kate Rubins and Russian cosmonauts Sergey Ryzhikov and Sergey Kud-Sverchkov reached the International Space Station.
The spacecraft began the journey to the space station from the Baikonur spaceport in Kazakhstan at 1.45 am EDT (10.45 am local Kazakh time) and it docked to the space station at 4.48 am EDT.
Previous Soyuz journeys to the space station had followed a six-hour track or two-day path. The journey marks the first time a Soyuz crew has taken the fast-track, two-orbit rendezvous path to the space station. At the time of launch, the station was flying about 259 miles over northwest Uzbekistan at the border with Kazakhstan, 339 statute miles ahead the Soyuz as it left the launch pad.
"Welcome back to the @Space_Station! With the capture of their space capsule confirmed at 4:48 am ET, @NASA_Astronauts Kate Rubins and cosmonauts Sergey Ryzhikov and Sergey Kud-Sverchkov have docked with the @Space_Station," NASA said in a tweet.
Their six-month mission will coincide with the space station's 20th anniversary marking 20 years of continuous human presence.
(With inputs from IANS)
