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Three-man space station crew returns to Earth tonight

BY WILLIAM HARWOOD

STORY WRITTEN FOR CBS NEWS "SPACE PLACE" & USED WITH PERMISSION

Posted: September 10, 2013



Two cosmonauts and a NASA astronaut packed up and readied their Soyuz spacecraft for undocking from the International Space Station overnight Tuesday, setting up a fiery plunge back to Earth to close out a 166-day stay in orbit.

Chris Cassidy, Pavel Vinogradov and Alexander Misurkin. Credit: Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center/NASA



"I definitely will be sad to go," Christopher Cassidy, a Navy SEAL-turned-astronaut completing his second spaceflight, told CBS Radio. "It's just so incredible and such an honor to be here. "But after five months (in space), you feel ready. I'm excited to get home to see my friends and family and get back to just normal stuff. So it'll be a little of all those emotions." Asked what he was looking forward to the most after seeing his wife and three children, Cassidy said "a gooey, fresh-baked chocolate chip cookie ranks right on the top of my list." "What I will miss most up here is the international camaraderie that exists with a crew like this, sharing meals together, sharing fun days and hard days and cargo days, the whole experience with the international crews is just really neat." With commander Pavel Vinogradov at the controls, flanked by flight engineer Alexander Misurkin on the left and Cassidy on the right, the Soyuz TMA-08M spacecraft was expected to undock from the station's upper Poisk module at 7:35 p.m. EDT (GMT-4) Tuesday. After moving about 12 miles away, Vinogradov plans to oversee a four-minute 46-second deorbit rocket firing starting at 10:05 p.m., slowing the spacecraft by about 286 mph to drop the far side of the orbit deep into Earth's atmosphere. Veteran of a 2009 shuttle flight, Cassidy said he was eager to experience a Soyuz landing. "Everybody I talk to, I ask them what it's like and they just shake their heads and say you've just got to experience it," he said. "So I'm really excited. But specifically, the parachute opening, I've done a bunch of regular parachute jumping with my own body and I'm curious to see what the opening shock will be like. Probably much more significant in this case! "And obviously, the impact at physical touchdown is a huge moment, too. There's a whole bunch of activities that will take place and I'll just be trying to keep up on my checklist." After a half-hour free fall, the Soyuz TMA-08M's upper and lower compartments will separate and the central crew module will plunge back into the discernible atmosphere at an altitude of 86 miles at 10:35 p.m. If all goes well, braking parachutes will deploy at an altitude of about 6.6 miles at 10:44 p.m., and the descent module will settle to a rocket-assisted touchdown at 10:58 p.m., closing out a mission spanning 70.4 million miles and 2,656 orbits over 166 days six hours and 14 minutes. Veteran astronaut Mike Fincke described a Soyuz landing in a NASA interview: "Once we hit the atmosphere and start to slow down, it's just an amazing ride," he said. "You can look right out the windows and you can see the ablative heat shield is melting, you can see the plasma ball that you're traveling through and you're slowing down. "We start hitting the atmosphere like in Central Africa, and by the time we hit central Asia as we travel north and east, we're slowed down enough that parachutes can pop out." Because the main parachute is mounted on the side of the capsule, "when it first pops out we kind of swing around in a big arc," Fincke said. "We haven't had gravity in a long time and all the suddeen we're swinging around in a big circle. And that comes right after the screaming in through the atmosphere and braking, pulling up to 6 Gs. "But then the parachute repositions itself and it then becomes kind of a normal parachute and we slow down. Then it's a gentle drifting ... until the last meter or so, the last three feet, when we meet the ground. We're going about 20 miles per hour at the time and we hit the Earth firmly. We know that we're back home." As usual for Soyuz descents, Russian and U.S. recovery crews were deployed near the landing site to help Vinogradov, Misurkin and Cassidy out of the cramped capsule for initial medical checks.

Russian recovery teams fly to the Soyuz landing site in Kazakhstan. Credit: NASA/Bill Ingalls



A few minutes later, once inside a nearby medical tent, Cassidy plans to participate in a new program to help researchers get a better idea of how long-duration spaceflight might affect astronauts on eventual flights to Mars. "This will be the first opportunity where we ask the crew members post landing to do some exercises," said Mike Suffredini, space station program manager at the Johnson Space Center in Houston. The idea is to get a better idea of what hurdles a Mars crew might face after a year-long flight without a medical team standing by to help out. "And the question is, what is their condition, what can we expect them to do?" Suffredini said. "And it will kind of lead our thinking on how the first few days of any exploration mission would take place to make sure the crew doesn't hurt themselves in the process of landing and getting themselves ready to operate on the surface of a foreign planet." As a former Navy SEAL, Cassidy is more familiar than most with physical fitness. But he said he expects vestibular difficulty -- poor balance and coordination -- to be more of an issue than physical strength. "At face value, the tasks that I'll be doing are not super complicated," he said. "From sitting in a chair, standing up, from lying down flat to standing up and some small jumps, I think, just a few basic things I did pre-flight. They have video of how my body reacts to those things when I'm normally adjusted to one G, and I'll do those again very soon after landing in the medical tent. "I'm kind of curious, to be quite honest, I'm really curious about how it will go," he said. "I remember how i felt after my shuttle landing and I think I could have done those. I would have been wobbly, but I would have been able to do those tasks. So I'm really, really curious to see how it is after this length of time. I don't think physical fitness has that much to do with it as neurovestibular kinds of things." After the medical checks are complete, all three station fliers will be flown by helicopter to nearby Karaganda. From there, the two cosmonauts will fly back to Star City near Moscow for debriefing while Cassidy will board a NASA jet for a flight back to Houston. During the course of their mission, Vinogradov logged one spacewalk and boosted his total time in space to 547 days over three flights. Misurkin, completing his first spaceflight, and Cassidy, completing his second, ventured outside three times each. During a July 16 spacewalk, Cassidy had to assist Italian astronaut Luca Parmitano when the latter's suit developed an internal leak, flooding the helmet with water. The spacewalk was terminated early and both men made it safely back inside. With the TMA-08M spacecraft's departure, the station will be in the hands of Expedition 37 commander Fyodor Yurchikhin, Parmitano and NASA astronaut Karen Nyberg. Yurchikhin and his crewmates will have the lab complex to themselves until Sept. 26 when the Soyuz TMA-10M spacecraft arrives, bringing veteran Oleg Kotov, Sergey Ryazanskiy and Michael Hopkins -- both rookies -- to the station, boosting the crew back to six.