News

November 22, 2011.
Soyuz TMA-02M space vehicle crew has returned to Earth

At 06 hours 25 minutes Moscow Time, descent module (DM) of Soyuz TMA-02M transport manned vehicle (TMV) performed soft landing in preset area to the north of the town of Arkalyk, Kazakhstan. All DM deorbiting, search and landing operations had gone off nominally.

Russian cosmonaut Sergei Volkov, NASA's astronaut Michael Fossum and Japan Space Agency's astronaut Satoshi Furukawa completed their flight to the international Space Station (ISS) under the ISS-28/29 Expedition Program.

Crew members of the International Space Station (ISS) ISS-30 Prime Crew continues work onboard the station: Russian cosmonauts Anton Shkaplerov and Anatoliy Ivanishin, as well as NASA's astronaut Daniel Burbank.

At Moscow Mission Control Center (MCC-M), the operations for conducting deorbiting and descent maneuvers by Soyuz TMA-02M space vehicle; search for the DM landed and evacuation of the crew members from the DM were performed under supervision of the State Committee (with the Chairman, Roscosmos Head V.A. Popovkin) and Technical Management in charge of manned space complexes flight tests (with the Head, RSC Energia President, General Designer V.A. Lopota).

Lead Operational Control Team (LOCT) monitored space vehicle flight during return to Earth stage (with V.A. Solovyov, RSC Energia first deputy General Designer, as the Flight Director). The LOCT worked in cooperation with aviation-space search and rescue specialists; other Russian organizations and services, as well as the US Mission Control Center in Houston.

The concluding operations associated with the space vehicle deorbiting, its DM landing were witnessed by the representatives of Roscosmos, NASA, European and Japanese space agencies, Russian companies and organizations involved in the ISS Program implementation who had been present at that time at MCC-M.

After the crew had been evacuated from DM of Soyuz TMA-02M vehicle, the press conference for Russian and foreign mass media was held at MCC-M.

Reference:

1. RSC Energia after S.P. Korolev is the leading enterprise of Russian rocket and space industry in the filed of manned space flight programs; responsible for building the ISS Russian Segment, its being integrated into the station and operational use, including building and operation of the main segment modules (Zvezda, Pirs, Poisk, Rassvet, etc.), as well as manufacture, commissioning and operational use of Soyuz TMA, Progress-M space vehicles.
2. TMV Soyuz TMA-02M is the second space vehicle from a new series of Soyuz TMA vehicles which performed space flight.
3. Duration of the flight performed by S. Volkov, M. Fossum and S. Furukawa was about 167 days 6 hours.