Space station crew landing: NASA astronaut Kate Rubins and two Russian cosmonauts have landed back on Earth

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Russian cosmonauts Sergey Ryzhikov and Sergey Kud-Sverchkov and NASA astronaut Kate Rubins completed their 185-day mission on the space station on Friday.

Their departure in the Soyuz MS-17 spacecraft was broadcast live on NASA’s TV channel and website. Their spacecraft’s hatch closed Friday night after the crew said goodbye to the others at the station, and they disconnected from the station’s Poisk gate at 9:34 p.m. ET.

The trio once again navigated Earth’s atmosphere, landing on the Kazakhstan steppe at 12:55 p.m. ET (10:55 a.m. local) Saturday.

The cosmonauts will return to their training base in Star City, Russia, and Rubins will fly home to Houston.

Together, the crew’s time at the station spanned 2,960 orbits and 78.4 million miles after their arrival in October.

Lots of time on board the space station

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This was Rubins’s second flight, meaning she has now spent 300 days in space, and Ryzhikov’s second flight helped him reach 358 cumulative days. Kud-Sverchkov experienced its first space flight.

This second spaceflight experience for Rubins involved hundreds of hours of work on space station experiments. She also served as an ambassador for science on calls to the space station with the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, among others.

She was the first person to sequence DNA in space in 2016 and continued that work with more sequencing during her second stay on the space station. With this capability, astronauts can diagnose illnesses while in space or even identify microbes growing on the space station to determine if they pose risks.

She collected samples from various locations around the space station to understand the space station’s microbiome. (The microbiome is the genetic material of the bacteria, viruses, and other microbes that live on the Space Station, including its inhabitants.)

This unique environment has housed the comings and goings of hundreds of astronauts for 20 years, while remaining separate from Earth.

Rubins also worked on heart research to study the effects of gravity on cardiovascular cells and grew and harvested radishes to gain a better understanding of plant growth in the absence of gravity.

Seven crew members remain

Astronauts harvest radishes that are grown on board the International Space Station

The departure of Rubins, Ryzhikov and Kud-Sverchkov leaves the space station with seven crew members.

This includes newly arrived NASA astronaut Mark Vande Hei and Russian cosmonauts Oleg Novitskiy and Pyotr Dubrov, as well as the crew of the historic NASA SpaceX Crew-1 mission that arrived in November. They are NASA astronauts Victor Glover Jr., Michael Hopkins and Shannon Walker, and Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) astronaut Soichi Noguchi.
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April is a busy time on the space station and it feels a bit like a revolving door when the crews arrive and depart.

On April 22, the space station’s occupancy will grow to 11 when NASA’s SpaceX Crew-2 members, including NASA astronauts Shane Kimbrough and Megan McArthur, JAXA astronaut Akihiko Hoshide, and European Space Agency astronaut Thomas Pesquet, arrive.

Astronauts on the space station have prepared for the new crew by setting up additional sleeping stations and clearing ports for the arrival of new spacecraft.

Subsequently, Crew-1 will return to Earth on April 28 and leave the space station with seven crew members.

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