After setting a record at 355 days in space, NASA astronaut Mark Vande Hei will return to Earth today.
The crew on board the Soyuz include Anton Shkaplerov, Mark Vande Hei and Pyotr Dubrov (from left to right). Photo: NASA
Vande Hei will land on the Russian Soyuz spacecraft in the Kazakh steppe with cosmonauts Anton Shkaplerov and Pyotr Dubrov. The flight took place after NASA confirmed that it continues to work closely with the Russian space agency Roscosmos.
The trio said goodbye to the crew aboard the International Space Station (ISS) and closed the hatch between the Soyuz spacecraft and the Rassvet docking module at midnight yesterday. As expected, the Soyuz spacecraft will separate from the ISS at 3:21 pm on March 30, Hanoi time. The spacecraft will fire to leave orbit at 18:30 on the same day. The crew will land by parachute in the area southeast of the town of Dzhezkazgan at 19:28.
After landing, Vande Hei will fly back to base in Houston on a Gulfstream jet, similar to other NASA astronauts. Meanwhile, the two Russian cosmonauts will return to their training base in Star City, Russia. Cooperation between Russia and Roscosmos at Baikonur Cosmodrome, Kazakhstan, continues to go smoothly, according to Joel Montalbano, NASA’s ISS program manager.
Vande Hei and Dubrov launched to the ISS in April 2021. They have traveled 5,680 times around the Earth and flew more than 240 million kilometers. Vande Hei breaks the record for the longest space flight for an American astronaut. The previous record was held by astronaut Scott Kelly with 340 days. The extended mission allows scientists to study the effects of long-term flight on the human body. The data obtained will help NASA prepare to send astronauts to the Moon and Mars.
This is Vande Hei’s second space flight. In total he spent 523 days in space. For Dubrov, it was his first time in orbit. Shkaplerov arrived at the ISS last October with a Russian director and actress. The crew returned to Earth a few weeks later. Shkaplerov stayed at the ISS and ended his fourth mission with a total of 708 days in space.
After Vande Hei, Dubrov and Shkaplerov left, the crew members that remained at the ISS include Marshburn, NASA astronauts Raja Chari and Kayla Barron, European Space Agency astronaut Matthias Maurer, and other astronomers. Russian travelers Oleg Artemyev, Denis Matveev and Sergey Korsakov flew to the station recently.
An Khang (According to CNN)
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