A week after two cosmonauts and a NASA astronaut arrived at the International Space Station, three crew members were wrapped up in their Soyuz spacecraft and blocked for a burning dive to Earth on Wednesday to close the 196-day mission.
The outgoing commander of Expedition 63, NASA astronaut Chris Cassidy, on Tuesday handed over the base to cosmonaut Sergey Ryzikov, and handed him a ceremonial “key” to enter the lab complex. Ryzykov, Sergei Kud-Sverkov and Kate Rubins arrived at the station last Wednesday on their own ship. Soyuz ferry ship.
NASA
Expedition 63 has been extremely fast, said former Navy SEAL Cassidy. “We’re kidding that there’s only Monday and Friday and the time between that is pretty vague.”
On November 2, 2000, the 20th anniversary of the first station crew’s 20th anniversary, the departure of the Ass CD came less than two weeks earlier. Since then, the lab has been staffed by an international astronaut-cosmonaut crew.
In a tweet on Tuesday, Cassidy noted that the first commander of the lab was also P.C.
“Twenty years ago my astro-seal mentor, Captain Bill Shepherd, took charge of Expedition 1,” Cassidy said. “We are now book-ending those two decades of man-made ISS operations with @us_navyseals astronauts in space.”
Cassidy, Soyuz MS-16 / 62S Commander Anatoly Ivanishin and Flight Engineer Evan Wagner were launched at the station on April 9. They landed in the same Soyuz and started at 3:30 a.m. Wednesday with an observation at 7:32 p.m. An hour’s journey on Earth and landing on the plains of Kazakhstan.
“Mama, I’m coming home!” Wagner tweeted.
After donating their pressure suits and moving a safe distance from the station, the Soyuz crew planned to monitor automatic 4-minute 40-second rocket firing starting at 10pm, slowing the ship to about 286 miles per hour to get to its side. Orbit in the atmosphere.
Twenty-five minutes later, the central crew module of the Soyuz spacecraft was expected to sink into a sensible atmosphere at an itude altitude of about miles૨ miles, before deploying a giant parachute and setting up to touchdown near the city of Zhezkazgan again. 10:55 a.m. (Thursday local time 8:55 a.m.).
As usual, Russian recovery forces, flight surgeons and NASA troopers were deployed near the landing site to help the station’s flyers get out of their stretched original module as they begin to rearrange the unknown tug of gravity 196 days four hours And after a 13-minute break. Planet.
After a quick round of medical check-ups, the crew was to be flown by helicopter to Zezkazgan, where Cassidy was to be housed in a NASA jet waiting for a long flight back to Houston. Ivanishin and Wagner will depart for Star City near Moscow.
NASA
Including the previous two flights, Cassidy’s total time in space is 3788 days, which will move him to fifth place in NASA’s list of most experienced astronauts. Evanishin, also completing his third flight, will enter space in 476 days while Wagner was completing his first space flight.
During the voyage to the space lab, Cassidy’s crew welcomed three unmanned cargo ships, a Soyuz crew – Ryzikov, Kud-Sverkov and Rubins – and NASA astronauts Douglas Hurley and Robert Bancan, the first piloted SpaceX crew drag.
Cassidy completed four spacewalks during his time, in a total of 23 hours and 37 minutes, pushing about 55 hours in a total of 10 trips.
Ryazikov, Kud-Sverkov and Rubins will have their own stations until mid-November, while NASA Plans to launch A female crew of three men in the lab since morning on the SpaceX crew Dragon Ferry Ship, raising the station crew to seven.
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