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Their return completed 167 days in space on a mission covering almost 71 million miles.<\/p>\n
Wilmore logged 178 days in space on two flights, the first of which was on space shuttle mission STS-129 in 2009. Samokutyaev spent 331 days in space on two flights, the first of which was on Expedition 27\/28 in 2011.<\/p>\n
This was Serova\u2019s first flight into space.<\/p>\n
\u201cButch\u201d Wilmore was also involved in three major spacewalks near the end of his tour of duty with the orbital outpost.<\/p>\n
![\"2015-03-11](\"https:\/\/www.nasaspaceflight.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/03\/2015-03-11-22_00_30-butch-wilmore-EVA-Google-Search-350x225.jpg\")
Along with Terry Virts, the EVAs successfully set the stage for the arrival of future cargo and crew vehicles \u2013 most notably SpaceX\u2019s Dragon 2 and Boeing\u2019s CST-100 that will begin to arrive as early as 2016 or 2017 \u2013 depending on their development schedules.<\/p>\nIn preparation for that safe trip home, the Soyuz TMA-14M crew donned their Sokol launch and entry suits, closed the hatch between the Orbital Module (BO) and Descent Module (SA), and strapped themselves into their Kazbek couches inside the SA.<\/p>\n
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Following undocking, the Soyuz enjoyed a few hours of free flight as it departed from the Station\u2019s neighborhood.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe wish you a good flight and a soft landing,\u201d was the message between the separating crews.<\/p>\n
![\"2015-03-11](\"https:\/\/www.nasaspaceflight.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/03\/2015-03-11-22_51_11-NASA-Public-350x229.jpg\")
The departing Soyuz also gained some amusing comments about seeing both arrays \u2013 given this was the Soyuz which arrived with just one array deployed. The second array decided to deploy \u2013 almost comically \u2013 after docking.<\/p>\nThe deorbit burn was the next key milestone of the return leg, conducted around one hour ahead of landing.<\/p>\n
The burn took four minutes and 41 seconds to complete, reducing the Soyuz\u2019s velocity just enough for it to begin the plunge back to Earth. This was not immediately confirmed due to a loss of communications, which became more dramatic as the blackout continued \u2013 prior to the relief of the re-establishment of audio with the crew.<\/p>\n
![\"2015-03-12](\"https:\/\/www.nasaspaceflight.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/03\/2015-03-12-02_57_40-NASA-Television-_-NASA-350x262.jpg\")
The Soyuz then \u201ceased\u201d \u2013 the reality is a rather bumpy return \u2013 its way to the ground under parachute, ahead of a landing southeast of Dzhezkazgan \u2013 with touchdown also taking a while to confirm, due to low clouds and heavy fog in the recovery area.<\/p>\nThe next immediate task involved the extraction of the crew from the SA by the Russian recovery forces that raced to the Soyuz\u2019s aid.<\/p>\n
The crew were transferred almost immediately on to special chairs, where medical checks were conducted, ahead of being moved to a medical tent by all terrain vehicles to prepare them for transit.<\/p>\n
![\"2015-03-12](\"https:\/\/www.nasaspaceflight.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/03\/2015-03-12-02_47_27-NASA-Television-_-NASA-350x236.jpg\")
However, they were instead loaded on to MI-8 helicopters and flown to a nearby airfield, where the crew will part ways.<\/p>\nSamokutyaev and Serova will be flown back to Star City, while Butch Wilmore will board a NASA Gulfstream III aircraft and flown back to Ellington Field in Houston, Texas \u2013 via two refuelling stops in Glasgow, Scotland, and Goose Bay, Canada.<\/p>\n
At the time of undocking, Expedition 43 officially will begin aboard the station under Terry Virts\u2019 command.<\/p>\n
Along with his crewmates Anton Shkaplerov of Roscosmos and Samantha Cristoforetti of ESA (European Space Agency), the three-person crew will operate the station for two weeks until the arrival of three new crew members.<\/p>\n
NASA astronaut Scott Kelly and Russian cosmonauts Mikhail Kornienko and Gennady Padalka, are scheduled to launch from Baikonur, Kazakhstan at end of the month.<\/p>\n
This will be a hugely historic mission, with Kelly and Kornienko scheduled to spend a year aboard the complex collecting valuable biomedical data that will inform future deep space, long-duration missions.<\/p>\n
Long duration impacts on the human body and mind are deemed to be one of the biggest non-engineering challenges of sending people to the surface of Mars.<\/p>\n
(Images via NASA and Roscosmos)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
NASA astronaut Barry Wilmore \u2013 along with flight engineers Alexander Samokutyaev and Elena Serova \u2013 bid farewell to their six month tour on the International Space Station (ISS) arrived home aboard their Soyuz TMA-14M spacecraft on Wednesday. Their mission concluded with a parachute-assisted \u2013 loss-of-communication drama \u2013 landing on the steppe of Kazakhstan early on Thursday […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":30117,"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":[233,1302],"class_list":["post-39384","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","tag-iss","tag-soyuz"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39384"}],"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=39384"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39384\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/30117"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=39384"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=39384"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=39384"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}