Soyuz spacecraft safely returns to Earth hours after leaving ISS

Sept. 23 (UPI) -- The Russian Soyuz MS-25 spacecraft safely landed in Kazakstan on Monday, some three hours after undocking from the International Space Station, returning two cosmonauts and one NASA astronaut to Earth.

The spacecraft made a parachute landing on the steppe of Kazakhstan, near Dzhezkazgan at 7:29 a.m. EDT. The Soyuz, which left the ISS's Prichal module at about 4:36 a.m., EDT, carried NASA astronaut Tracy Dyson and cosmonauts Nikolai Chub and Oleg Kononenko.

The crew were expected to fly via helicopter to the recovery city of Karaganda, Kazakhstan. From there, Dyson will take a NASA airplane back to the Johnson Space Center near Houston. It was Dyson's third trip to the space station as an engineer. She was part of Expeditions 70 and 71, NASA said.

Kononenko and Chub set a record for a single ISS mission, spending 374 days in space. Russians Sergei Prokopyev and Dmitry Petelin along with NASA's Frank Rubio set the old record of 371 days on the space station from September 2022 to September 2023.

Kononenko already holds the record for overall time in space with 1,111 days in orbit.

Dyson spent 184 days in space, arriving on SoyuzMS-25 in March with cosmonaut Oleg Novitskiy and spaceflight participant Marina Vasilevskaya, from Belarus. Novitskiy and Vasilevskaya returned to Earth after 12 days on Soyuz MS-24.

NASA astronaut Nick Hague and cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov are expected to join the remaining International Space Station crew with they launch from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, on Thursday and arrive on Saturday. They will be arriving on the SpaceX Crew-9 mission.

NASA said the mission to the space station will be the first human spaceflight to launch from the Space Launch Complex-40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station.