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3 Soyuz crew to return to Earth on Wednesday
May 13, 2014, 11:15 am

File photo of With commander Mikhail Tyurin at the controls, flanked on the left by NASA flight engineer Rick Mastracchio and on the right by Japanese astronaut Koichi Wakata, the Soyuz TMA-11M spacecraft [ NASA]

File photo of With commander Mikhail Tyurin at the controls, flanked on the left by NASA flight engineer Rick Mastracchio and on the right by Japanese astronaut Koichi Wakata, the Soyuz TMA-11M spacecraft [ NASA]

Three crew members from the International Space Station are due to return to Earth on Wednesday morning after 188 days in space, a spokesperson for Russia’s Mission Control Center said Tuesday.

“Russian cosmonaut Mikhail Tyurin, JAXA astronaut Koichi Wakata and US astronaut Rick Mastacchio will come back aboard a re-entry capsule of the manned Soyuz TMA-11M spaceship,” the spokesperson was quoted by Russian state news agency Ria Novosti.

The Soyuz spacecraft will undock from the ISS early on Wednesday, at 2:35 a.m. Moscow time, before reentering the atmosphere at 5:36 a.m., with the parachute deploying eight minutes later.

The capsule is expected to touch down 148 km southeast of Kazakhstan’s Jezkazgan.

The Soyuz TMA-11M spacecraft carrying a three-man crew and a symbolic torch for the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympic Games docked with the International Space Station on November 7, 2013.

The Rossiya 24 TV channel showed the smiling nine-member crew passing around the unlit Olympic torch in a live broadcast from the ISS.

 

Source: Agencies