After 185 days aboard the International Space Station, two Russian cosmonauts and a NASA astronaut returned to Earth early Saturday morning.
NASA’s Kate Rubins and Roscosmos’ Sergey Ryzhikov and Sergey Kud-Sverchkov landed in the steppes of Kazakhstan at 12:55 pm after leaving the station in the Soyuz MS-17 spacecraft at 21:34 EDT.
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In a blog post on Saturday, NASA reported that the crew, pending medical examinations, would break up.
Rubins – the first person to follow DNA in space – will return home to Houston, Texas and Ryzhikov and Kud-Sverchkov will fly back to their training base in Star City, Russia.
The Soyuz MS-17 spacecraft is seen landing in a remote area near the city of Zhezkazgan, Kazakhstan, with expedition 64 crew members Kate Rubins of NASA, Sergey Ryzhikov and Sergey Kud-Sverchkov of Roscosmos, Saturday, April 17, 2021. Rubins, Ryzhikov and Kud-Sverchkov returned to space after 185 days after serving as expedition 63-64 crew members aboard the International Space Station. Photo credit: NASA / Bill Ingalls
(NASA)
Dmitry Rogozin, head of Roscosmos, said all three were feeling well after being taken out of the capsule, according to The Associated Press.
The Expedition 64 trio arrived at the station on October 14, 2020 and served as flight engineers.
During their tenure, the group conducted hundreds of scientific experiments, supervised the arrival and departure of various vehicles and space walks.
While the trip was Ryzhikov and Rubins’ second spaceflight, it was the first Kud-Sverchkov.
According to Space.com, they traveled a total of 78.4 million miles and completed 2,960 orbits of the Earth.
NASA noted that the seven crew members of Expedition 65 remain aboard the station, including Roscosmos’s Oleg Novitskiy and Pyotr Dubrov, the astronaut from the space agency Soichi Noguchi, the NASA astronauts Victor Glover, Michael Hopkins, Mark Vande Hei and the new station commander Shannon Walker.
Vande Hei, Novitskiy and Dubrov arrived on April 9 and Hopkins, Glover, Walker and Noguchi boarded the SpaceX Crew Dragon ‘Resilience’ in November.
The crew of Expedition 64 of three members of JAXA (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency). From left are Kate Rubins of NASA, Sergey Ryzhikov of Roscosmos and Sergey Kud-Sverchkov of Roscosmos.
(NASA)
The November flight was the first docking station under NASA’s commercial crew program.
Later this month, NASA’s SpaceX Crew 2 members – including NASA astronauts Shane Kimbrough and Megan McArthur, Japanese astronaut Akihiko Hoshide and European Space Agency astronaut Thomas Pesquet – will join the Expedition 65 members at the station. .
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Their launch on the SpaceX Crew Dragon “Endeavor” is scheduled for April 22nd.
Walker will then hand over the order to Hoshide before she, Hopkins, Glover and Noguchi leave for Earth on April 29.
In November 2020, the station surpassed a 20-year milestone of continuous human presence. To date, 243 people from 19 countries have visited the orbital laboratory.