Hibapress
The Soyuz MS-25 spacecraft has successfully landed in Kazakhstan with two Russian cosmonauts and a U.S. astronaut after a long-duration mission to the International Space Station (ISS), the Russian space agency Roscosmos announced on Monday.
“Today at 14:59 Moscow time, the descent module of the Soyuz MS-25 spacecraft carrying the members of the 70th and 71st long-duration missions, Roscosmos cosmonauts Oleg Kononenko and Nikolai Chub, who spent a year on the ISS, as well as NASA astronaut Tracy Dyson landed near the Kazakh city of Zhezkazgan,” the Roscosmos official website said in a statement. Cosmonauts Kononenko and Chub spent a total of 374 days in space, which is the longest space mission on the ISS.
The record for time spent in orbit in a single mission, however, belongs to two other Russian cosmonauts, namely Valery Polyakov and Sergei Avdeyev: the former spent 437 days at the Russian space station Mir in 1994-1995 and the latter 379 days at the same station in 1998-1999. By the end of his mission, Kononenko had accumulated a total of 1,111 days in five space flights, which is the absolute record for time spent in space, the same source added.
Currently, three Russian cosmonauts are in the top three in terms of total space flight time: Oleg Kononenko, Gennady Padalka and Yuri Malenchenko. American astronaut Peggy Whitson, the first woman to command the ISS, is also in the top 10. In one year, the ISS orbit was corrected 16 times with the help of Russian spacecraft engines, and the station hosted 14 spacecraft, according to a count by Roscosmos.
