Science & Technology

Soyuz MS-17 spacecraft with 3 crew members lands on Kazakh steppes

Moscow, Apr 17 (EFE).- The Russian spaceship Soyuz MS-17 landed safely in the Kazakhstan steppes on Saturday, according to live broadcast by the Russian space agency Roscosmos.

The descent capsule landed at 04.56 GMT, some 147 kilometers (91 miles) southeast of the Kazakh city of Zhezkazgan, with Russian cosmonauts Sergey Ryzhikov and Sergey Kud-Sverchkov and NASA astronaut Kate Rubins on board.

The three crew members have spent six months on the international space station, where Russian cosmonauts Oleg Novitskiy and Pyotr Dubrov, US astronauts Mark Vande Hei, Shannon Walker, Michael Hopkins and Victor Glover, and the Japanese Soichi Noguchi remain.

The spacecraft landed on the Kazakh steppes just over three hours after decoupling from the International Space Station.

The first to leave the capsule, as per protocol, was the mission commander, Sergey Ryzhikov, for whom this was the second flight to the ISS.

From the initial tests performed on the Soyuz MS-17 crew members after landing, all three are in perfect health.

Ryzhikov, Kud-Sverchkov and Rubins were in space for 185 days, during which they carried out close to 50 scientific experiments.

In November 2020, the Russian cosmonauts made a spacewalk that lasted seven hours.

The International Space Station, a project worth more than $150,000 million, is made up of 15 permanent modules and orbits the Earth at a distance of 400 kilometers and a speed of more than 27,000 kph. EFE

aj/sc/lds

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