The Space Shuttle Docks with Mir

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.