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Science ISS-16 crew ends 192-day mission: Off-course but safe
Science ISS-16 crew ends 192-day mission: Off-course but safe | ISS-16 crew ends 192-day mission: Off-course but safe |
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| by William Atkins | |
| Sunday, 20 April 2008 | |
  
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Science DiscussionsThe two Expedition 16 members now home on Earth are ISS commander/NASA astronaut Peggy Whitson and ISS Expedition flight engineer/RSA Soyuz commander/RSA cosmonaut Yuri Malenchenko. They were joined in their return to Earth by South Korean astronaut So-Yeon Yi, the country’s first astronaut to go into space. The landing occurred at around 4:51 a.m. EDT, about twenty minutes later than the scheduled 4:30 a.m. landing time. The actual landing site, in addition, was about 260 miles (420 kilometers) away from the expected landing site north of Arkalyk, Kazakhstan. It took Russian recovery forces about 45 minutes to arrive at the site. The three members of the TMA-11 flight were reported in good spirits. However, Russian Mission Control spokesperson Valery Lyndin said the crew had been subjected to quite high G-forces (gravitational forces) during the re-entry through Earth’s atmosphere. The off-nominal “ballistic re-entry” trajectory for the spacecraft was steeper than normal. The crew experienced about 10 Gs, which is about ten times the force of gravity on the surface of the Earth, what we normally experience on Earth. Whitson spent nearly 185 days as a flight engineer on the Expedition 5 crew, between June 4 and December 7, 2002. This 192-day mission on Expedition 16 gives her 377 days in space, breaking the former U.S. record by NASA astronaut Mike Foale of 374 days in space. It was the third long-duration spaceflight for Russian Air Force colonel Malenchenko. Besides the 192-day mission for ISS Expedition 16, Malenchenko also spent 126 days on the Mir space station in 1994, was a member of the NASA STS-106 crew for a 12-day mission in 2000, and commanded Expedition 7 for 185 days on the ISS in 2006. His four trips in space has given him 515 days in space. However, he still has a ways to go to beat the record by RSA cosmonaut Sergei Krikalev of 803 days in space, which he attained in 2005. The Expedition 17 crew remains on the International Space Station. The three-member crew consists of RSA cosmonauts Sergey Volkov (its commander) and Oleg Kononenko (flight engineer) and NASA astronaut Garrett Reisman (flight engineer). |
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