3 astronauts set to return on Earth abroad Russian spacecraft
Washington: Three Expedition 59 crew — NASA astronaut Anne McClain, Soyuz Commander Oleg Kononenko of Roscosmos, and Flight Engineer David Saint-Jacques of the Canadian Space Agency — are set to ride back to Earth from the International Space Station (ISS).
The Russian Soyuz MS-11 spacecraft would undock from the ISS at 5 a.m. (India time) on Tuesday morning and land in Kazakhstan later in the night.
Cosmonaut Alexey Ovchinin and NASA astronauts Christina Koch and Nick Hague would continue their stay aboard the orbiting lab.
The crew is completing a 204-day mission spanning 3,264 orbits of the Earth and a journey of 86.4 million miles.
McClain’s first trip into space has been a busy mission, including two spacewalks that completed a battery swapout and worked on the Station’s power systems.
Saint-Jacques’ mission will be the longest single spaceflight by a Canadian astronaut.
They will be transported home under the command of Kononenko, which will have logged 737 days in space on his four flights, putting him in sixth place on the all-time list of space travellers for cumulative time.