Two cosmonauts and an astronaut landed safely from the International Space Station after spending 185 days aboard the orbital laboratory.
Sergey Ryzhikov and Sergey Kud-Sverchkov of the Russian State Space Corporation Roscosmos and Kate Rubins of NASA touched the steppes of Kazakhstan on Saturday (April 17) and boarded the Russian Soyuz MS-17 spacecraft. The three crew members landed south of the remote city of Dzhezkazgan at 12:55 EDT (0455 GMT or 10:55 local Kazakh time).
“Behind our shoulders there are six months to be on the space station,” Ryzhikov said during a brief command change on Thursday as he relinquished the leadership of the crew of the Expedition 64 station. “It was an incredible time and it was unforgettable. There were many memorable events during our increase.”
After the landing, Russian recovery forces, as well as NASA personnel, were ready to assist the crew from the Soyuz capsule and conduct medical investigations. Rubins would next be flown back to Houston by the NASA plane, while Ryzhikov and Kud-Sverchkov would be flown back to their training center in Star City, Russia.
Ryzhikov, Kud-Sverchkov and Rubins’ departure from the station on Friday at 21:34 EDT (0134 GMT GMT) was the official end of Expedition 64. At the time of their decoupling, Expedition 65 began at the station under the command of NASA. astronaut Shannon Walker.
“I know I’m speaking to everyone when I say thank you so much for these wonderful five months we’ve had together,” Walker told Ryzhikov as she accepted command of the station. “It was truly the teamwork and the camaraderie that made it very special.”
“Expedition 64 was incredibly busy. We did all kinds of research, I do not know how many EVAs [extravehicular activities or spacewalks] ‘between the two sides, several trucks, we did station repairs, we did station upgrades, we did station maintenance,’ Walker said.
Walker, along with NASA astronauts Michael Hopkins, Victor Glover and Mark Vande Hei, Japan’s astronaut Exploration Agency (JAXA), Soichi Noguchi and cosmonauts Roscosmos, Oleg Novitskiy and Pyotr Dubrov, will run the station for one week until the SpaceX’s Crew-2 arrives. Shane Kimbrough and NASA’s Megan McArthur, JAXA astronaut Akihiko Hoshide and European Space Agency (ESA) astronaut Thomas Pesquet plan to dock their Dragon “Endeavor” to the station on April 22.
Walker will then hand over the command of the crew of Expedition 65 to Hoshide before she, Hopkins, Glover and Noguchi land on Dragon “Resilience” on April 29th.
Ryzhikov, Kud-Sverchkov and Rubins arrived at the station on October 14 on the Soyuz MS-17.
During their 185-day career, Ryzhikov, Kud-Sverchkov and Rubins conducted hundreds of experiments in the disciplines of biology, biotechnology, physical and earth sciences. They also oversaw the arrival and departure of several visiting vehicles, including SpaceX’s first operational Crew Dragon mission, which brought the Crew-1 astronauts to the Expedition 64 crew.
Ryzhikov and Kud-Sverchkov each performed their first spacewalk by making the very first EVA from the Russian Poisk module. The two worked 6 hours and 48 minutes outside the station to prepare for the removal of the Pirs plant module, which will pave the way for the arrival of the Russian Nauka multipurpose laboratory later this year.
Rubins, along with Glover and Noguchi, led two space walks to prepare the space station for the installation of new, more capable solar arrays. The two seven-hour EVAs raised her total career time in space at 26 hours and 46 minutes during her four space walks.
It was the second spaceflight of Ryzhikov and Rubins and the first of Kud-Sverchkov. Rubins has now recorded 300 days in space. Ryzhikov spent 358 cumulative days on the planet.
The three traveled a total of 126 million kilometers and completed 2,960 orbits of the earth.