WASHINGTON (dpa-AFX) - Russian cosmonauts - Oleg Kononenko and Nikolai Chub - have returned to earth after spending a record 374 days aboard the International Space Station.
Kononenko and Chub, who launched to the station in September last year, spent 374 days in space on a trip of 158.6 million miles, spanning 5,984 orbits.
For Chub it was his first spaceflight, while Kononenko completed his fifth flight into space, accruing the record for the longest cumulative time of 1,111 days in orbit.
The Soyuz MS-25 spacecraft, carrying the Russians and American astronaut Tracy Dyson, made a safe, parachute-assisted landing at 7:59 a.m. ET (4:59 p.m. local time), southeast of the remote town of Dzhezkazgan, Kazakhstan.
Sunita Williams, one of the NASA astronauts currently stranded on the International Space Station after arriving there on a Boeing Starliner spacecraft, rang the bell for her colleagues' departure.
She became the commander of ISS after the cosmonauts left.
Following post-landing medical checks, the crew will return to the recovery staging city in Karaganda, Kazakhstan. Dyson will then board a NASA plane bound for the agency's Johnson Space Center in Houston.
Spanning 184 days in space, Dyson's third spaceflight covered 2,944 orbits of the Earth and a journey of 78 million miles as an Expedition 70/71 flight engineer.
Copyright(c) 2024 RTTNews.com. All Rights Reserved
Copyright RTT News/dpa-AFX
© 2024 AFX News
