{"id":15116,"date":"2016-10-30T19:27:06","date_gmt":"2016-10-30T11:27:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wp-productionenv-bjg9h2g2bgg5b8aa.southeastasia-01.azurewebsites.net\/news\/international-space-crew-wraps-up-nearly-four-months-in-orbit\/"},"modified":"2016-10-30T19:27:06","modified_gmt":"2016-10-30T11:27:06","slug":"international-space-crew-wraps-up-nearly-four-months-in-orbit","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/news\/international-space-crew-wraps-up-nearly-four-months-in-orbit\/","title":{"rendered":"International space crew wraps up nearly four months in orbit"},"content":{"rendered":"

STORY WRITTEN FOR CBS NEWS & USED WITH PERMISSION<\/p>\n

\"The
The Soyuz MS-01 spacecraft touches down cushioned by \u201csoft landing\u201d rockets at 0358 GMT (11:58 p.m. EDT). Credit: NASA\/Bill Ingalls<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

A veteran Russian cosmonaut, a Japanese flight engineer and a NASA scientist-astronaut undocked from the International Space Station and returned to Earth Saturday, landing on the steppe of Kazakhstan to close out a 115-day mission.<\/p>\n

With Soyuz MS-01 commander Anatoly Ivanishin at the controls, flanked on the left by flight engineer Takuya Onishi and on the right by NASA\u2019s Kate Rubins, the charred descent module settled to a jarring rocket-and-parachute-assisted touchdown east of Dzhezkazgan at 11:58 p.m. EDT (GMT-4; 9:58 a.m. Sunday local time).<\/p>\n

Russian recovery crews deployed nearby reached the capsule within minutes to help the returning station fliers out of the cramped descent module as they began re-adjusting to the unfamiliar pull of Earth\u2019s gravity \u2014 and its weather. The crew was greeted by an overcast sky and temperatures in the low 30s Fahrenheit.<\/p>\n

Looking fit and in good spirits despite the chill, Ivanishin, Onishi and Rubins were carried to nearby recliners where they were draped in blankets before initial medical checks and satellite phone calls home to friends and family.<\/p>\n

The recovery team planned to fly the crew by helicopter to Karaganda for a traditional Kazakh welcome-home ceremony. From there, Ivanishin planned to fly back to the cosmonaut training center in Star City near Moscow while Rubins and Onishi boarded a NASA jet for the long flight back to the Johnson Space Center in Houston.<\/p>\n

Left behind in orbit were Expedition 50 commander Shane Kimbrough, Sergey Ryzhikov and Andrey Borisenko, who reached the space station on Oct. 21 aboard the Soyuz MS-02 spacecraft.<\/p>\n

They will have the station to themselves until Nov. 19 when three fresh crew members \u2014 Soyuz MS-03 commander Oleg Novitskiy, European Space Agency flight engineer Thomas Pesquet and veteran NASA astronaut Peggy Whitson \u2014 arrive two days after their own launch from Baikonur.<\/p>\n

For Ivanishin, Rubins and Onishi, touchdown closed out an action-packed, research intensive mission spanning 1,840 orbits and 48.7 million miles since launch from Baikonur on July 6.<\/p>\n

Over the course of the mission, the crew welcomed a Russian Progress supply ship, a SpaceX Dragon freighter, an Orbital ATK Cygnus cargo craft and the Soyuz MS-02 spacecraft that brought Kimbrough\u2019s crew to the station.<\/p>\n

Rubins, who holds a doctorate in cancer biology, participated in two spacewalks totaling 12 hours and 48 minutes and carried out pioneering DNA sequencing experiments in space.<\/p>\n

\u201cExpedition 49 to International Space Station is coming to its end,\u201d Ivanishin said Friday as he handed command over to Kimbrough. \u201cI think time is a very interesting and not fully understood phenomenon. I have a feeling that we came to the space station just yesterday, and tomorrow it\u2019s time for us to undock and go back to our planet.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m kind of reluctant to close the hatch because being on the space station is a very unique experience,\u201d he added. \u201cFirst of all, I didn\u2019t have time to know what\u2019s going on on our planet. And second, maybe it is for the better.\u201d<\/p>\n

Speaking in English, Ivanishin said the space station offers a \u201cvery friendly, really good environment of people who are working together. We came from different nations, we speak different languages, but being on space station, we feel like one crew.\u201d<\/p>\n

Reluctant to leave or not, Ivanishin, Onishi and Rubins floated into the MS-01 spacecraft and closed the hatch around 5:12 p.m. and undocked from the station\u2019s Rassvet module at 8:35 p.m.<\/p>\n

The Soyuz MS-01 spacecraft was the first in a new series of upgraded ferry craft, featuring improved communications, navigation and propulsion systems, along with increased redundancy. While two MS spacecraft have been launched to this point, Ivanishin\u2019s crew was the first to put the upgraded spacecraft through its paces for re-entry and landing.<\/p>\n

Moments after undocking, Ivanishin carried out a series of tests, manually firing the ship\u2019s maneuvering thrusters to verify the system\u2019s performance. The tests went well and at 11:06 p.m., the crew fired the ship\u2019s braking rockets for four minutes 37 seconds, slowing the ship by about 186 mph.<\/p>\n

That was just enough to drop the far side of the orbit deep into Earth\u2019s atmosphere as planned. Twenty-two minutes later, the three modules making up the MS-01 spacecraft separated and three minutes after that the central crew module fell into the discernible atmosphere at an altitude of about 62 miles.<\/p>\n

Oriented heat shield first, the descent module endured temperatures of some 2,500 degrees as it fell through the zone of peak heating, falling from 50 miles up to an altitude of about 20 miles, rapidly slowing and subjecting the crew to three to four times their normal weight.<\/p>\n

At an altitude of about six-and-a-half miles, a large parachute was deployed, slowing the descent module still more. Finally, an instant before touchdown, small rocket motors fired to sharply reduce the vertical velocity to just a few miles per hour.<\/p>\n

With the Soyuz MS-01 crew safely home, Russian engineers will press ahead with preparations to launch the next spacecraft in the series, the Soyuz MS-03 ferry craft, to carry Novitskiy, Pesquet and Whitson to the station. Launch from the Baikonur Cosmodrome is targeted for Nov. 15 with arrival at the space station expected two days later.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

STORY WRITTEN FOR CBS NEWS & USED WITH PERMISSION The Soyuz MS-01 spacecraft touches down cushioned by \u201csoft landing\u201d rockets at 0358 GMT (11:58 p.m. EDT). Credit: NASA\/Bill Ingalls A veteran Russian cosmonaut, a Japanese flight engineer and a NASA scientist-astronaut undocked from the International Space Station and returned to Earth Saturday, landing on the steppe of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[2032,3346,1545,717,377,877,1770,1302],"class_list":["post-15116","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","tag-anatoly-ivanishin","tag-expedition-49","tag-human-spaceflight","tag-international-space-station","tag-japan","tag-jaxa","tag-kate-rubins","tag-soyuz"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15116"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15116"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15116\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15116"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15116"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15116"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}