Image of Soyuz MS-25 leaving International Space Station on Monday. Photo courtesy of NASA
The Russian Soyuz MS-25 spacecraft unlocked from the International Space Station on Monday morning, launching its journey to return two cosmonauts and one NASA astronaut to Earth.
The spacecraft left the ISS’s Prichal module at about 4:36 a.m., EDT. NASA astronaut Tracy Dyson and cosmonauts Nikolai Chub and Oleg Kononenko were on board. The Soyuz spacecraft is expected to land by parachute near Dzhezkazgan, Kazakstan. Advertisement
Kononenko and Chub set a record for a single ISS mission, spending 374 days in space. Russians Sergei Prokopyev and Dmitry Petelin along with NASA’s Frank Rubio set the old record of 371 days on the space station from September 2022 to September 2023.
Kononenko already holds the record for overall time in space with 1,111 days in orbit.
Dyson spent 184 days in space, arriving on SoyuzMS-25 in March with cosmonaut Oleg Novitskiy and spaceflight participant Marina Vasilevskaya, from Belarus. Novitskiy and Vasilevskaya returned to Earth after 12 days on Soyuz MS-24.
NASA astronaut Nick Hague and cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov are expected to join the remaining International Space Station crew with they launch from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, on Thursday and arrive on Saturday. They will be arriving on the SpaceX Crew-9 mission. Advertisement
NASA said the mission to the space station will be the first human spaceflight to launch from the Space Launch Complex-40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station.
