With a Russian cosmonaut, commander Oleg Kononenko at the controls, Canadian co-pilot David Saint-Jacques and veteran Army helicopter pilot Anne McClain, the Soyuz MS-11/57S spacecraft separated from the International Space Station’s upper Poisk module at 7:25 PM EDT on Monday (Tuesday at 7:25 AM GMT+8) and landed on the balmy steppe of Kazakhstan three hours and 22 minutes later to wrap a 204-day mission in the orbit.
The International Space Station is now the home of the Expedition 60 crew for the next three months, led by mission commander Alexey Ovchinin, NASA flight engineer Nick Hague and Christina Koch who arrived to the station on June 24, 2019. They will be joined by Aleksandr Skvortsov, Luca Parminato and Andrew Morgan, which is scheduled to arrive on Soyuz MS-13 in early July 2019.
After backing a safe distance away from the space station, Kononenko monitored a four-minute 39-second deorbit rocket firing, starting at 9:55 p.m., that slowed the spacecraft by 286 mph, just enough to drop the far side of the orbit deep into the atmosphere.
Before plunging back into the atmosphere at an altitude of about 62 miles, the Soyuz’s upper orbit module and its lower propulsion and power section were discarded to burn up in the atmosphere while the central crew module, the only one with a heat shield, fell back into the lower atmosphere.
Six minutes later, the crew cabin exited the region of maximum heating from atmospheric friction and deployed its parachutes to slow from a velocity of about 515 mph to a much more sedate 16 mph or so.
Finally, an instant before touchdown southeast of the town of Dzhezkazgan, six solid-propellant rocket motors ignited, slowing the ship to walking pace, just 3.4 mph, for an on-target landing at 10:47 p.m. EDT (8:47 a.m. local time).
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