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posted by takyon on Sunday December 23 2018, @06:20PM   Printer-friendly
from the skeleton-crew dept.

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow1984

Crew of three safely lands in Kazakhstan after 197-day space mission – Spaceflight Now

A Russian cosmonaut, a German flight engineer and a NASA astronaut undocked from the International Space Station and plunged back to Earth overnight Wednesday, landing on the snowy steppe of Kazakhstan to wrap up a six-month mission. Blocked from view by low clouds and wind-blown snow, the Soyuz MS-09/55S spacecraft, suspended beneath a large orange-and-white parachute, touched down on the frigid steppe near the town of Dzhezkazgan at 12:02 a.m. EST Thursday (GMT-5; 11:02 a.m. local time), three-and-a-half hours after departing the space station.

[...] [Alexey] Ovchinin and [Nick] Hague were victims of a launch abort Oct. 11, the first for a Soyuz spacecraft since 1983. Instead of reaching the station and joining Gerst, Prokopyev and Auñón-Chancellor, Ovchinin and Hague were forced to make an emergency landing near Dzhezkazgan, throwing a wrench into the carefully planned crew rotation schedule. Russian engineers quickly traced the problem to the system used to control the separation of the four liquid-fueled strap-on boosters making up the Soyuz FG booster's first stage. A fix was relatively straight forward.

After assessing multiple options, Russian managers opted to move up launch of Kononenko's crew from Dec. 20 to Dec. 3 and to delay the departure of Gerst and his crewmates from Dec. 13 to Dec. 20.


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