One NASA astronaut and two Roscosmos cosmonauts will leave the International Space Station next week and return home.
NASA astronaut Tracy C. Dyson, accompanied by Roscosmos cosmonauts Nikolai Chub and Oleg Kononenko, will depart from the International Space Station aboard the Soyuz MS-25 spacecraft on September 23 (US time), making a parachute-assisted landing on the steppe of Kazakhstan later on the same day.
Kononenko will hand over station command to NASA astronaut Suni Williams for Expedition 72, which begins at the time of undocking.
NASA will live stream coverage of the return and related activities on its website and the NASA app.
Kononenko will hand over station command to NASA astronaut Suni Williams for Expedition 72, which begins at the time of undocking.
Dyson’s mission covered 184 days in space, covering 2,944 orbits of the Earth and a journey of 78 million miles. The Soyuz MS-25 spacecraft launched on March 23, 2024, and arrived at the station two days later, with Dyson, Roscosmos cosmonaut Oleg Novitskiy, and spaceflight participant Marina Vasilevskaya of Belarus onboard. Novitskiy and Vasilevskaya were aboard the station for 12 days before returning home with NASA astronaut Loral O’Hara on April 6.
Kononenko and Chub, who launched with O’Hara to the station on the Soyuz MS-24 spacecraft last September, will return after 374 days in space and a trip of 158.6 million miles, spanning 5,984 orbits.
Dyson spent her fourth spaceflight aboard the station as an Expedition 70 and 71 flight engineer and departs with Kononenko, completing his fifth flight into space and accrues a record 1,111 days in orbit, and Chub, who completed his first spaceflight.
After returning to Earth, the three crew members will fly on a helicopter from the landing site to the recovery staging city of Karaganda, Kazakhstan. Dyson will board a NASA plane and return to Houston, while Kononenko and Chub will depart for a training base in Star City, Russia.
