The
Soyuz MS-23 undocked from the ISS a minute earlier than
scheduled. It will shoot around Earth in orbit and then blast
downwards into the Earth's atmosphere at 10:55 GMT, said
Roscosmos, Russia's space corporation.
"The undocking has taken place," Moscow mission control said.
Rubio, who is 47 and on his first space voyage, is travelling
back to Earth with Russian cosmonauts Sergey Prokopyev, 48, and
Dmitry Petelin, 40.
Shortly after entering the atmosphere, it will unfurl a
parachute and is due to land in the grassland steppe of
Kazakhstan, around 148 km (91 miles) southeast of the city of
Zhezqazghan, at 11:17 GMT.
They are six months late to return because their original
spacecraft sprang a leak so a replacement had to be sent up to
get them back. That gave the two Russians and Rubio an
unexpectedly extended mission of 371 days in orbit.
On Sept. 11, Rubio surpassed the previous NASA record of 355
consecutive days in space set by now-retired U.S. astronaut Mark
Vande Hei. Rubio is also the first American to spend a full year
in space.
Though Rubio broke the American record, he and his Russian
colleagues are far from the Russian record.
Valeri Polyakov, a Russian, holds the world record for the
longest space journey ever - 437 consecutive days and 18 hours
during a Mir space station mission between January 1994 and
March 1995. Polyakov died last September aged 80.
(Reporting by Guy Faulconbridge in Moscow and Steve Gorman in
Los Angeles; Editing by Mark Trevelyan and Gareth Jones)
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