– Two cosmonauts and an astronaut landed safely at the International Space Station after spending 185 days aboard the orbiting laboratory.
Sergey Ryzhikov and Sergey Kud-Sverchkov of the Russian state space corporation Roscosmos and Kate Rubins of NASA reached the steppe in Kazakhstan on Saturday (April 17th), riding aboard the Soyuz MS-17 spacecraft in Russia. The three crew members landed southeast of the remote Kazakh city of Dzhezkazgan at 12:55 a.m. EDT (0455 GMT or 10:55 a.m. local Kazakh time).
“There are six months behind us in the space station,” Ryzhikov said during a brief change of order ceremony on Thursday when he resigned as leader of the station’s 64th Expedition crew. “It was an amazing time and it was unforgettable. There were many unforgettable events during our growth.”
After landing, Russian recovery forces, as well as NASA personnel, were on hand to help the crew get out of the Soyuz landing capsule and provide initial medical checks. Rubins was to be flown back to NASA in Houston, while Ryzhikov and Kud-Sverchkov were being flown back to the training center in Star City, Russia.
The departure of Ryzhikov, Kud-Sverchkov and Rubins from the station on Friday at 21:34 EDT (0134 GMT on Saturday) marked the official end of Expedition 64. At the time of their disembarkation, Expedition 65 began on the station under the command of NASA Astronaut Shannon Walker.
“I know I’m talking to everyone when I thank you very much for these wonderful five months we’ve had together,” Walker told Ryzhikov as he accepted the station’s order. “Truly, teamwork and camaraderie have made her very special.”
“Expedition 64 was incredibly busy. I did all kinds of research, I don’t know how many EVAs [extravehicular activities or spacewalks] between the two sides, several freight vehicles, 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 Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) astronaut Soichi Noguchi, and Roscosmos cosmonauts Oleg Novitskiy and Pyotr Dubrov, will operate the station for a week until the SpaceX crew arrives. 2. NASA’s Shane Kimbrough and Megan McArthur, JAXA astronaut Akihiko Hoshide and European Space Agency (ESA) astronaut Thomas Pesquet are scheduled to launch on April 22 and lure their Dragon “Endeavor” to the station the next day.
Walker will then hand over command of Hoshide’s Expedition 65 crew before she, Hopkins, Glover and Noguchi land on the “Resilience” Dragon on April 29.
Ryzhikov, Kud-Sverchkov and Rubins arrived on the Soyuz MS-17 station on October 14. They served as flight engineers on the crew of Expedition 63 for a week before Expedition 64 began.
During the 185 days in orbit, Ryzhikov, Kud-Sverchkov and Rubins performed hundreds of experiments in the disciplines of biology, biotechnology, physics and Earth science. They also oversaw the arrival and departure of several visiting vehicles, including the first SpaceX Crew Dragon operational mission, which brought Crew-1 astronauts to join the Expedition 64 crew.
Ryzhikov and Kud-Sverchkov each made their first space journey by making the first EVA in the Russian Poisk module. The two worked outside the station for 6 hours and 48 minutes to prepare for the removal of the Pirs docking module, which will pave the way for the arrival of the Nauka Polyvalent Laboratory in Russia later this year.
Rubins, along with Glover and Noguchi, took two spacewalk walks to prepare the space station for the installation of new, more capable solar arrays. The two seven-hour EVAs brought her total career time working in the vacuum of space to 26 hours and 46 minutes during the four space walks.
This was Ryzhikov and Rubins’ second spaceflight and Kud-Sverchkov’s first. Rubins recorded 300 days ago in space. Ryzhikov spent a total of 358 days on the planet.
The three traveled a total of 126.4 million kilometers, completing 2,960 Earth orbits.