APOD: 1995-12-17
Hundreds of kilometers above the Earth's surface, the United States Space Shuttle Atlantis docks with the Russian Space Station Mir. The photograph was taken by Nikolai Budarin from a Russian Soyuz spacecraft on July 4, 1995. During this mission astronauts answered questions from school students over amateur radio, and performed life science experiments aboard the SpaceLab. The SpaceLab experiments were designed to understand how the Russian Space program combats the effects on the human body of the long-durations in space.
