In May, the Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Centre revealed that Kikina was going to fly to the International Space Station (ISS) in the fall of 2022.
According to the ISS flight program, Kikina will go to the ISS on board the Soyuz MS-22 spacecraft on 21 September 2022, and will remain in space for 188 days, until 18 March 2023.
Experiment participant Anna Kikina at a news conference on the ground simulation of the SIRIUS-17 lunar expedition, Moscow
© Sputnik / Maksim Blinov
/ Kikina has been the only active Russian female cosmonaut since September 2016. In November 2017, she took part in the international SIRIUS (Scientific International Research in Unique Terrestrial Station) project that studies the effects of isolation, simulating Moon missions.
The Soviet Union sent the first two women into space: Valentina Tereshkova in 1963 and Svetlana Savitskaya in 1982 and 1984. Another two Russian women were sent into space after the collapse of the USSR: Yelena Kondakova and Yelena Serova.
Kondakova travelled to the orbital Mir space station in the 90s. She is the first woman to make a long-duration spaceflight and the combined duration of her two flights to the Mir station is 178 days - the current record for a Russian female cosmonaut.
The world record for a female astronaut's total time in space was set by NASA astronaut Peggy Whitson, who accrued a total of 665 days in space over the course of her career.