ALMATY, Kazakhstan — Two Russian cosmonauts and a
NASA
astronaut touched down Saturday on the steppe of Kazakhstan following a
half-year mission on the
International Space Station, footage broadcast by the
Russian space agency showed.
اضافة اعلان
Russia’s Sergei Ryzhikov and Sergei Kud-Sverchkov as well as
NASA’s Kate Rubins landed on barren land at 0455 GMT around 150 kilometers
southeast of the town of Zhezkazgan.
The Soyuz descent module carrying the trio landed upright
after descending through a cloudless sky on a fine spring day in central
Kazakhstan, a Roscosmos TV commentator confirmed.
Molecular biologist Rubins, 42, and former military pilot
Ryzhikov, 46, were rounding off their second missions in space having both made
their ISS debuts following launches in July and October of 2016 respectively.
Kud’-Sverchkov, 39, another ex-military man, was completing
his first mission.
Footage from the landing site showed Rubins smiling as she
received a bouquet of flowers from retired cosmonaut Yuri Malenchenko, who was
there to greet the crew.
“It is great to be on this side of things,” Rubins said.
She will return to NASA’s hub in Houston while colleagues
Ryzhikov and Kud-Sverchkov are bound for Moscow as they wind down their
missions.
During her debut mission in 2016, Rubins became the first
person to sequence DNA in space.
In her second mission she continued her sequencing
activities, worked on cardiovascular experiments and oversaw a small patch of
radishes “as they grew in orbit… harvesting them for analysis back on Earth”,
according to NASA.
Busy orbital lab
For the last decade, the space station’s population has
typically varied between three and six as crews that blasted off from Russia’s
Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan came and went.
Entrepreneur Elon Musk’s SpaceX last year broke the monopoly
that Russia and Baikonur had held on manned launches since the mothballing of
the US shuttle programme in 2011, beginning a new chapter of spaceflight from
US soil.
As a result the number of crew on board will reach 11 next
week with the arrival of NASA’s SpaceX Crew-2 mission.
NASA’s Shane Kimbrough and Megan McArthur, Japanese
astronaut Akihiko Hoshide, and Thomas Pesquet of the European Space Agency are
expected to dock with the ISS next Friday, with the four-person crew they are
replacing scheduled to return to Earth on April 28.
The absolute record for people aboard the ISS was set in
2009, when an arriving crew took the orbital lab’s population to 13.
That is also the joint all-time record for the most people
in space at any one time after seven astronauts were aboard the NASA space
shuttle Endeavour and a six-man crew was aboard the Mir space station
simultaneously in March 1995.
Continuously occupied for more than 20 years, the ISS is
expected to be retired before the end of the decade, raising questions about
future cooperation between Russia and the West in space.
NASA on Friday said it had selected SpaceX to develop a
spacecraft to land the first astronauts on the surface of the Moon since 1972 —
a huge victory for Elon Musk’s company.
April 12 marked the sixtieth anniversary of Soviet cosmonaut
Yuri Gagarin’s historic mission marking the beginning of human spaceflight and
a key moment in the space race between Moscow and the West.
Since the fall of the Soviet Union there has been more
cooperation than competition, although it is difficult to disguise the
appearance that Roscosmos and NASA are going their separate ways as the ISS
winds down.
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