WASHINGTON/MOSCOW. Sept 27 (Interfax) - U.S. astronaut Frank Rubio, who returned to Earth on the Russian Soyuz MS-23 crewed spacecraft from the International Space Station (ISS), will fly to the United States from Karaganda soon, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) said.
According to NASA, the crewmembers will take separate helicopters and fly to Karaganda after taking the necessary medical tests.
Rubio will take a NASA plane to fly to Houston, and cosmonauts Sergei Prokopyev and Dmitry Petelin will take a plane of the Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center to fly to their training base in Russia's Star City, NASA said.
Joel Montalbano, NASA's manager of the ISS Program Office, has also arrived at the landing site in Zhezkazgan.
The Soyuz MS-23 crew, who have now left the landing capsule, have been sent to the medical tent erected near the landing site. Specialists from the Institute for Biomedical Problems of the Russian Academy of Sciences, the Federal Medical-Biological Agency, the crewmembers' doctors and NASA medical personnel will examine them there.
Initially, it was planned to use three planes, an Antonov An-26 and two An-12 and six helicopters in the area of the controlled descent and two in the ballistic descent area, Alexei Lukyanov, the head of the department for aviation and space search and rescue of the Russian Federal Agency for Air Transport, said.
"Unfortunately, the weather made its adjustments: the An-12 and An-26 planes could not leave Karaganda for weather reasons, heavy rain. Also, unfortunately, equipment fails, one helicopter remained in Zhezkazgan and could not arrive at the calculated point. But all specialists were distributed to helicopters, all necessary specialists arrived at the actual landing point," Lukyanov said during a Roscosmos broadcast.
The Soyuz MS-23 undocked from the ISS on Wednesday. Its landing capsule landed 148 km southeast of Zhezkazgan, Kazakhstan, at 2:17 p.m. Moscow time.
Prokopyev, Petelin and Rubio arrived at the ISS on the Soyuz MS-22 on September 21, 2022. The crew's mission on the ISS was extended until September 27, 2023 as a meteoroid damaged the spacecraft's radiator. The crew returned to Earth on the Soyuz MS-23, which arrived at the station in February to replace the damaged Soyuz MS-22.
The crew spent 370 days, 21 hours and 22 minutes in space, which became the longest flight under the ISS program.
The crew of Expedition 70 - Roscosmos cosmonauts Oleg Kononenko, Nikolai Chub and Konstantin Borisov, NASA astronauts Jasmin Moghbeli and Loral O'Hara, ESA astronaut Andreas Mogensen, and JAXA astronaut Satoshi Furukawa - remain on the station.