Still on board the station are Kelly and cosmonauts Mikhail Kornienko and Sergey Volkov.
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Kononenko, Lindgren and Yui arrived at the station on July 22.
From a layperson’s standpoint, coming back to Earth is arguably the scariest part of space travel. This was the first mission for Lindgren and Yui, but Kononenko must be used to the fiery barrel ride of reentry by now: With three missions under his belt, the cosmonaut has spent a cumulative 533 days in space.
With the Soyuz TMA-17M crew safely back on the Earth, Russian space engineers will quickly shift gears, setting their sights on launching three fresh station crew members on Tuesday to boost the lab’s crew back to six.
The winter weather in Kazakhstan brought further complications: Fewer recovery helicopters were sent out, and instead of doing medical exams at the landing site, the returning spacefliers were hustled onto the copters for a flight to the nearest airport. The mission spanned 2,256 orbits and 59.6 million miles.
On December 15, three other radio amateurs – UK ESA astronaut Tim Peake, KG5BVI, NASA astronaut Tim Kopra, KE5UDN, and Russian cosmonaut Yuri Malenchenko, RK3DUP – will launch from Baikonur, Kazakhstan to replace the returnees.
“Welcome home @astro_kjell @Astro_Kimiya & @OlegKononenko!!” “Congratulations on an incredible mission”. The fifth Japanese HTV cargo craft brought several tons of supplies to the station in August, and in October, a Russian ISS Progress cargo craft docked to the station, also bringing tons of supplies.
The central crew module, oriented heat shield first, was expected to slam into the atmosphere about three minutes later, enduring about five minutes of extreme heating and four to five times the normal force of gravity during a fast plunge into the thick, lower atmosphere.
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Members of the Expedition 45 team, which include flight engineers Kjell Lindgren of NASA, Oleg Kononenko of Roscosmos (Russian Federal Space Agency) and Kimiya Yui of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) landed safely at 8:12 a.m. EST (7:12 p.m. Khazahk time) this morning nearby the Kazahk town of Dzhezkazgan.
