Space station personnel land: NASA’s Kate Rubins and Russian astronauts back

Space station personnel land: NASA’s Kate Rubins and Russian astronauts back

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Russian cosmonauts Sergey Ryzhikov and Sergey Kud-Sverchkov and NASA astronaut Kate Rubins will complete their 185-day mission to the space station.

Their departure in the Soyuz MS-17 spacecraft will be broadcast live on NASA’s TV channel and website. The hatch will close on their spacecraft at 18:10 ET on Friday after the crew of the others said goodbye to the station and are expected to leave the station’s Poisk harbor at 21:34 ET. The trio will land on the Kazakhstan steep land at 12:56 on Saturday.

The cosmonauts return to their training base in Star City, Russia, and Rubins flies home to Houston.

Together, the crew time at the station after their arrival in October covered 2,960 orbits of the earth and 78.4 million miles.

Lots of time on board the space station

Previously unknown bacteria discovered in the space station can help grow plants

It was the second flight for Rubins, meaning she now spent 300 days in space, and the second flight for Ryzhikov helped him reach 358 cumulative days. Kud-Sverchkov experienced his first spaceflight.

This second space experience for Rubins spent hundreds of hours experimenting in the space station. She also served as an ambassador for science during calls to the space station with, among others, the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

She was the first person to sequence DNA in space in 2016 and continued the work with more sequence during her second stay at the space station. With this capability, astronauts can diagnose diseases in space or even identify microbes growing on the space station to determine if they pose any risks.

She collected samples from different places across the space station to understand the microbiome of the space station. (The microbiome is the genetic material of the bacteria, viruses and other microbes that live in the space station, also in its inhabitants.)

This unique environment offers hundreds of astronauts the arrival and has been going on for 20 years, while remaining separate from the earth.

Rubins also worked on cardiac research to study the effects of gravity on cardiovascular cells and grew and harvested radishes to create a better understanding of plant growth in the absence of gravity.

There are still seven crew members left

Astronauts harvest radishes grown on board the International Space Station

The departure of Rubins, Ryzhikov and Kud-Sverchkov leaves the space station with seven crew members.

These include the newly arrived NASA astronaut Mark Vande Hei and the Russian astronauts Oleg Novitskiy and Pyotr Dubrov, as well as the crew of the historic NASA SpaceX Crew-1 mission that arrived in November. They are NASA astronauts Victor Glover Jr., Michael Hopkins and Shannon Walker, and Japanese astronaut (JAXA) astronaut Soichi Noguchi.
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April is a busy time on the space station, and it feels a bit like a revolving door as the crew arrives and departs.

On April 22, the space station’s crew will be scheduled for 11 when NASA’s SpaceX Crew 2 members, including NASA astronauts Shane Kimbrough and Megan McArthur, JAXA astronaut Akihiko Hoshide and astronaut Thomas Pesquet of the European Space Agency arrive. .

Astronauts at the space station prepared for the new crew by setting up extra berths and clearing ports for the arrival of new spacecraft.

Then, on April 28, Crew-1 will return to Earth and leave the space station again with seven crew members.

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