Disembarkation of the space station crew: Kate Rubins from NASA and Russian cosmonauts return

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Russian cosmonauts Sergey Ryzhikov and Sergey Kud-Sverchkov and NASA astronaut Kate Rubins will finish their 185-day mission to the space station on Friday.

Its launch on the Soyuz MS-17 spacecraft will be broadcast live on the television channel and on NASA’s website. The hatch will close at its spacecraft at 6:10 pm ET Friday after the crew said goodbye to the other people at the station and are expected to disembark from the station’s Poisk port at 9:34 pm ET. The trio will land at 12:56 a.m. Saturday in the steppe of Kazakhstan.

The cosmonauts will return to their training base in Star City, Russia, and Rubins will fly home to Houston.

Together, the crew’s time at the station covered 2,960 Earth orbits and 78.4 million miles after its arrival in October.

Long time aboard the space station

Unknown bacteria previously discovered at the space station could help the plants grow

This was the second flight for Rubins, which means he has now spent 300 days in space, and the second flight for Ryzhikov helped him reach 358 accumulated days. Kud-Sverchkov experienced his first space flight.

This second space flight experience for Rubins included hundreds of hours working on space station experiments. She also served as a science ambassador during calls to the space station with the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, among others.

He was the first person to sequence DNA in space in 2016 and continued this work with more sequencing during his second stay on the space station. This capability could allow astronauts to diagnose disease while in space or even identify microbes that grow on the space station to determine if they pose risks.

He collected samples from different places on the space station to understand the microbiome of the space station. (The microbiome is the genetic material of bacteria, viruses, and other microbes that live inside the space station, including inside its residents).

This unique environment has hosted the arrival and departure of hundreds of astronauts for 20 years, while keeping them separate from Earth.

Rubins also worked on heart research to study the effects of gravity on cardiovascular cells and grew and harvested radishes to create a better understanding of plant growth in the absence of gravity.

Seven crew members remain

Astronauts pick up radishes grown aboard the International Space Station

The departure of Rubins, Ryzhikov and Kud-Sverchkov leaves the space station with seven crew members.

This includes newly arrived NASA astronaut Mark Vande Hei and Russian cosmonauts Oleg Novitskiy and Pyotr Dubrov, as well as the crew of the historic NASA SpaceX Crew-1 mission that arrived in November. They are NASA astronauts Victor Glover Jr., Michael Hopkins and Shannon Walker, and Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) astronaut Soichi Noguchi.
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April is a very busy time at the space station and it looks like a revolving door when crews arrive and depart.

On April 22, space station occupancy is expected to grow to 11 when NASA SpaceX Crew-2 members arrive, including NASA astronauts Shane Kimbrough and JAXA astronaut Megan McArthur Akihiko Hoshide and European Space Agency astronaut Thomas Pesquet.

Space station astronauts have prepared for the new crew by establishing additional sleep stations and freeing up ports for the arrival of new spacecraft.

Crew-1 is then scheduled to return to Earth on April 28, leaving the space station with seven crew members again.

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