Overview
- The spacecraft undocked from the Prichal module at 8:41 p.m. ET on Dec. 8 and touched down at 12:03 a.m. ET on Dec. 9 southeast of Dzhezkazgan.
- Cloud cover obscured the parachute descent, but recovery forces made verbal and visual contact confirming a nominal landing.
- Post-landing, Kim began his return to NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, while Sergey Ryzhikov and Alexey Zubritskiy departed for the Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center.
- The crew completed 245 days on orbit during Expedition 73, circling Earth 3,920 times and logging roughly 167 million kilometers; it was the first flight for Kim and Zubritskiy and the third long-duration mission for Ryzhikov.
- Their work included biomedical and robotics demonstrations such as studies of bioprinted vascularized tissue, remote robot control under the Surface Avatar experiment, and in-space nanomaterials fabrication.