A little while ago, cosmonauts Sergey Prokopyev and Dmitri Petelin and astronaut Frank Rubio returned to Earth on the Soyuz MS-23 spacecraft, which landed in Kazakhstan. They spent just over one year on the International Space Station, where they arrived on September 21, 2022, as part of Expedition 67. According to the original schedule, they were supposed to spend about six months on the Station but the failure of the Soyuz MS-22 spacecraft led to to double their mission’s duration.

During the time spent on the International Space Station with the final part of Expedition 69, the three crew members carried out various routine maintenance activities and many scientific experiments. It’s now normal for the rotation conducted using the Russian Soyuz spacecraft to cross paths with the rotation conducted using the American SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft. For this reason, over the last month, there was a turnover of personnel with departures and arrivals during which there were no new arrivals and departures of space cargo ships nor have spacewalks been conducted.

On Tuesday, September 26, Sergey Prokopyev officially handed over command of the International Space Station to ESA astronaut Andreas Mogensen. The departure of the Soyuz MS-23 spacecraft marked the beginning of Expedition 70. The normal crew rotation has resumed, which, however, includes a one-year mission for cosmonaut Oleg Kononenko.

The return to Earth of Sergey Prokopyev, Dmitri Petelin, and Frank Rubio marks the end of a very long, unexpected mission complicated by the failure of the Soyuz MS-22 spacecraft’s cooling system. The space agencies involved took advantage of this situation to accumulate more information on the long-term effects of microgravity on the human body. For example, Frank Rubio ran for a time an exercise program using limited equipment to simulate the limitations of a mission to the Moon or deep space in a spacecraft where there’s no room for a treadmill.