2023 Author: Bryan Walter | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-05-21 22:24
Cosmonauts Scott Kelly and Mikhail Kornienko will return home on March 2 after a yearlong mission to the ISS. Also, cosmonaut Sergei Volkov will return with them on the Soyuz TMA-18M spacecraft. The return of the members of the ISS's 46 long-term crew to Earth can be watched live on the NASA website.
Farewell to the crew and closing of the ISS and Soyuz TMA-18M transfer hatches will begin at 00:40 Moscow time, until 01:00 the cosmonauts will board the Soyuz. Yuri Malenchenko (Russia), Timothy Kopra (USA) and Timothy Peak (Great Britain) will remain at the station. Undocking of the Soyuz is scheduled for 4:02 am. According to the calculations of the Mission Control Center, the astronauts are expected to land at approximately 7:25 Moscow time, 147 kilometers from the city of Dzhezkazgan, which is located in Kazakhstan.
The arrival of astronauts on Earth will be monitored by search and rescue teams. However, they will not provide assistance to the astronauts when exiting the capsule: the mission participants will have to open the hatch and leave it on their own. Such a scenario simulates a landing on Mars, where there will be no rescuers to meet.
Kelly and Kornienko spent 340 days onboard the ISS and orbited the Earth 5440 times within the framework of the Year in Orbit project. The purpose of the one-year mission is to study the effect of long-term stay in space on the human body.
