On September 27, American astronaut Frank Rubio and two Russian astronauts began their journey back to Earth from the International Space Station (ISS), six months later than planned.
NASA astronaut Frank Rubio boards the Soyuz MS-22 spacecraft at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on September 21, 2022. (Photo credit: AFP/TTXVN).
The Russian space agency Roscosmos announced that the Soyuz MS-23 spacecraft departed the ISS one minute earlier than scheduled, orbiting Earth before re-entering the atmosphere at 10:55 GMT on September 27 (17:55 Hanoi time). Immediately after entering the atmosphere, the spacecraft deployed its parachutes and landed in the Kazakh steppe at 11:17 GMT (18:17 Hanoi time).
Aboard the spacecraft were 47-year-old American astronaut Rubio, along with two Russian astronauts, Sergey Prokopyev, 48, and Dmitry Petelin, 40. Their return journey to Earth was delayed by six months due to technical issues with the originally scheduled spacecraft, which was replaced by another vehicle sent to the ISS. This situation provided the three astronauts with an unexpectedly extended mission, lasting a total of 371 days in orbit.
On September 11, astronaut Rubio surpassed the previous record of 355 consecutive days in space held by fellow retired astronaut Mark Vande Hei. Rubio also became the first American to spend a full year in space, marking this as his inaugural space exploration mission.
While astronaut Rubio has set a record for American astronauts, he and his Russian colleagues still fall short of the record set by Russian astronaut Valeri Polyakov, who spent 437 days and 18 hours on a mission aboard the Mir space station from January 1994 to March 1995. Polyakov passed away in September 2022 at the age of 80.
