On September 27th, at 14:17 Moscow time, not far from the city of Jezkazgan, Kazakhstan, the crew of the International Space Station (ISS) landed. Among the crew members was an alumnus of South Ural State University Dmitry Petelin.
The cosmonaut had spent 371 days on orbit, which is considered to be the longest ISS program mission. The preparations for the crew’s return to Earth began early in the morning. The undocking and the further steps for landing the descent module of Soyuz MS-23 went as planned, and no contingency situations or technical failures were detected.
“We were very happy to hear the news of Dmitry and his crew’s return to Earth. On behalf of the SUSU’s entire team, and especially of the Aerospace Engineering division, we’d like to congratulate Dmitry on the successful completion of his mission and wish him health, happiness and future success. We’re proud that he is our university’s alumnus and we’re grateful for his support. It would’ve been a great pleasure to see him visit our university. I’m sure that our students would’ve been very interested to hear about his record-breaking mission, which had lasted more than a year,” shared Head of the Rocket and Space Technology Centre named after V.P. Makeyev, Associate Professor, Candidate of Sciences, Deputy Head of the SUSU Department of Aircrafts Viktor Fedorov.
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“During this first mission aboard the ISS, Dmitry Petelin spent the total of more than 39 hours in outer space over the 6 times that he had to perform extra vehicular activity,” representatives of Roscosmos explained.
Dmitry Petelin is 40. He had been born in Kazakhstan and had moved to the Chelyabinsk Region. He had graduated from the Aerospace Engineering Faculty of South Ural State University, and had waited for his chance to fly to space for 10 years.