Three veteran space station fliers strapped into their Soyuz ferry craft, undocked and plunged back to Earth today, making a fiery descent to a frigid pre-dawn landing in Kazakhstan to close out a 127-day stay in space.
With Soyuz commander Yuri Malenchenko strapped into the descent module's center seat, flanked on the left by outgoing Expedition 33 commander Sunita Williams and on the right by Japanese astronaut Akihiko Hoshide, the crew undocked from the station's Russian Rassvet module at 5:26 p.m. EST as the two spacecraft sailed 250 miles above northwestern China.
Soyuz TMA-05M commander Yuri Malenchenko, left, and flight engineer Sunita Williams, right, chat with recovery crews shortly after landing in Kazakhstan. Crewmate Akihiko Hoshide is out of view to the left.
(Credit: NASA TV)
Two-and-a-half hours later, positioned about 12 miles from the International Space Station, Malenchenko and Williams, acting as flight engineer, monitored a four-minute 43-second firing of the craft's braking rockets, slowing the ship by about 186 mph and kicking off an hour-long descent to Earth.
After a half-hour free fall, the Soyuz TMA-05M's upper module and lower instrument and propulsion section separated and three minutes later, the manned descent module fell into the discernible atmosphere at an altitude of about 63 miles.
The plunge back to Earth went smoothly, and the spacecra... [Read more]
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