U.S. astronaut Frank Rubio, who broke the file for the longest steady spaceflight by an American, and two Russian cosmonauts started their journey again to Earth on Wednesday from the International Space Station (ISS), six months late.
The Soyuz MS-23 undocked from the ISS a minute sooner than scheduled. It will shoot round Earth in orbit after which blast downwards into the Earth’s environment at 10:55 GMT, stated Roscosmos, Russia’s house company.
“The undocking has taken place,” Moscow mission management stated.
Rubio, who’s 47 and on his first house voyage, is travelling again to Earth with Russian cosmonauts Sergey Prokopyev, 48, and Dmitry Petelin, 40.
Shortly after getting into the environment, it’ll unfurl a parachute and is because of land within the grassland steppe of Kazakhstan, round 148 km (91 miles) southeast of town of Zhezqazghan, at 11:17 GMT.
They are six months late to return as a result of their authentic spacecraft sprang a leak so a substitute needed to be despatched as much as get them again. That gave the 2 Russians and Rubio an unexpectedly prolonged mission of 371 days in orbit.
On Sept. 11, Rubio surpassed the earlier NASA file of 355 consecutive days in house set by now-retired U.S. astronaut Mark Vande Hei. Rubio can be the primary American to spend a full yr in house.
Though Rubio broke the American file, he and his Russian colleagues are removed from the Russian file.
Valeri Polyakov, a Russian, holds the world file for the longest house journey ever – 437 consecutive days and 18 hours throughout a Mir house station mission between January 1994 and March 1995. Polyakov died final September aged 80.
(Reporting by Guy Faulconbridge in Moscow and Steve Gorman in Los Angeles; Editing by Mark Trevelyan and Gareth Jones)
