Following its orbit corrections, Soyuz MS-08 was scheduled to begin an autonomous rendezvous with the ISS around 20:18:08 Moscow Time on March 23, 2018, aiming to lock sensors of its Kurs-NA rendezvous system onto the station during the 34th orbit of the mission.

The final maneuvers, including a flyaround of the ISS, a short station-keeping period and berthing were scheduled to commence at 22:18:03 Moscow Time on March 23, 2018.

The final approach was expected to culminate with an automated docking at the MIM2/Poisk module on the Russian segment of the station on March 23, 2018, at 22:41 Moscow Time (3:41 p.m. EDT). The actual docking took place just a minute earlier at 22:40 Moscow Time (3:40 p.m. EDT).

The hatches between the spacecraft and the station were scheduled to open around two hours after docking, following the routine leak checks in the docking interface. Aboard the station, three members of the Soyuz MS-08 crew will join Expedition 55 Commander Anton Shkaplerov and Flight Engineers Scott Tingle and Norishige Kanai, who launched on Dec. 17, 2017, on the Soyuz MS-07 spacecraft.

During the spacewalk, the duo manually launched four small spacecraft, including scientific and educational nano-satellites SiriusSat-1 and SiriusSat-2. They were developed at the Sputniks company based in Skolkovo, Russia, for the nation's Sirius educational center in Sochi. Both satellites were delivered to the station aboard the Progress MS-09 cargo ship in July 2018. Two other launched nano-satellites were Tanyusha-YuZGU-3 and Tanyusha-YuZGU-4 built within the Radioskaf experiment for the Southwestern State University in the city of Kursk, Russia.

The cosmonauts also successfully deployed the Icarus antenna. However due to extra time required for the primary tasks, cosmonauts were to retrieve only two out of four containers in the Test experiment installed on the SO1 module. A trip to the MIM2 module to remove two other containers was canceled. The jettisoning of the Obstanovka hardware was also postponed for later spacewalks. In the course of the spacewalk, the cosmonauts also had to use small napkins to remove some contamination from their gloves. The napkins were then ejected against the direction of the flight to avoid their contact with the station before their reentry into the atmosphere.

This 45th Russian spacewalk aboard the ISS was also the 212th excursion outside the the station overall, the third in Artemyev’s career and the first for Prokopyev. It was also the 7th spacewalk conducted on ISS in 2018 and 2nd Russian spacewalk of the year.

This mission proved to be an odd one, in the sense that a tiny hole in the Soyuz MS capsule had been dicovered after mission control. They claimed a 2mm hole detected in the Russian Soyuz MS Module docked at the ISS might have been drilled deliberately - and they are not ruling out the possiblility that one of the astronauts was the perpetrator. With accommodation for a maximum of six astronauts/cosmonauts, the strees can lead to psychological unstabability and can appear in many forms. The alarm was raised when mission controllers in Houston and Moscow noticed a fall in cabin pressure on the ISS.

If this hole had not been found, the occupants would run out of air with 18 days, fortunately the hole was small enough to be fixed with a sealing tape and epoxy. However this situation is unnerving to say the least, the hole does not look accidental.

This situation asks for further research on the effects concerning radiation and the time in space and how it effects astronautes/cosmonauts for varied durations.

Could this be down to rogue engineers and bodge work at the Soyuz factory? Either way the whole incident requires full investigation as lives depend on the outcome and could leave a bitter taste for those having to work together.