The Soyuz spacecraft carrying two Russian astronauts and an American astronaut took off from the International Space Station (ISS) on Wednesday afternoon and landed in Kazakhstan. A rare example of cooperation in the midst of the crisis over Ukraine.
The Russian space agency Roscosmos has announced that the Soyuz MS-19 capsule carrying the Russians Anton Shkaplerov and Piotr Dubrov, as well as the American Mark Vande Hei, will be separated from the ISS at GMT 07:21 as planned.
The visit comes amid strong tensions over Ukraine between US-led Russia and Western nations, which have called into question several projects in the field of space cooperation.
In early March, Roscosmos released a video joking about the possibility of the American staying on the ISS, instead of returning to Earth on a Soyuz rocket.
Considering the concerns of the Americans, the Russian company had to assure them that the astronaut would be on board.
Mark Vande Hey holds the record for most consecutive 355 days in space by an American astronaut.
In the midst of tensions, Dmitri Rogozin, head of Roscosmos, which promotes nationalist statements on social media, said in mid-March that the operation of a Russian spacecraft providing the ISS with Western sanctions against Russia for operations in Ukraine would be disrupted.
According to him, this could cause a “splash down or landing of the 500 tonne ISS”.
Space cooperation between Russia and the West is one of the few areas that has not been much affected by the sanctions imposed on Moscow since the annexation of the Ukrainian peninsula Crimea in 2014.
But in recent weeks, several cooperation programs have been affected by the crisis in Ukraine.
The European Space Agency (ESA) announced in mid-March that it had suspended Russian-European Exo-Mars missions and was looking for alternatives to four other missions.
(With information from AFP)
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