Soyuz Crew Undocks from Station for Return to Earth

The Soyuz MS-21 spacecraft with three cosmonauts aboard departs the space station on time to return the crewmates to Earth. Credit: NASA TV
The Soyuz MS-21 spacecraft with three cosmonauts aboard departs the space station on time to return the crewmates to Earth. Credit: NASA TV

The Soyuz spacecraft undocked from the International Space Station at 3:34 a.m. EDT, carrying three people back to Earth. Live coverage on NASA TV, the agency’s website, and the NASA app will resume at 5:45 a.m. for the deorbit burn and landing of the spacecraft carrying Roscosmos cosmonauts Oleg Artemyev, Denis Matveev, and Sergey Korsakov. Their landing in Kazakhstan is targeted for approximately 6:57 a.m. (4:57 p.m. Kazakhstan time).

Expedition 68 officially began aboard the station at the time of undocking. Samantha Cristoforetti of ESA (European Space Agency) is the station commander for the crew consisting of NASA astronauts Bob Hines, Kjell Lindgren, Frank Rubio, and Jessica Watkins, and Roscosmos cosmonauts Sergey Prokopyev and Dmitri Petelin.

The trio arrived at the station March 18 aboard the Soyuz MS-21 spacecraft. Artemyev returns to Earth after 195 days in space on his third mission. At the time of landing, Artemyev will have logged 561 days in space on his three flights.

This was the first flight for both Matveev and Korsakov. At the time of landing, the two cosmonauts will have each logged 195 days in space.

Learn more about station activities by following the space station blog, @space_station and @ISS_Research on Twitter, as well as the ISS Facebook and ISS Instagram accounts.

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