A Day Late, ISS Expedition 34 Crew Makes Perfect Landing

Ground crew clamber over the Soyuz TMA-06M capsule after Expeditio n34 lands (Credits: NASA).

International Space Station Expedition 34 crewmembers Kevin Ford, Evgeny Tarelkin, and Oleg Novitskiy had expected to be back on Earth on March 15. But bad weather at their landing site forced the crew to postpone their homecoming. One day later, the trio landed their Soyuz TMA-06M on the Kazakh steppe in the midst of fog in freezing winter temperatures. On March 16 0311 GMT, after 144 days in space, they were safely back on the ground.

With ISS fully operational, the partner nations responsible for the station are eager to get as much scientific value from each mission as possible. Expedition 34 was

The official Expedition 34 portrait, with mission patch (Credits: NASA).

packed full of research, from the European Space Agency’s surfactant experiment FASTER and NASA’s related colloidal project InSPACE-3, to the Canadian Space Agency’s Microflow1 to quantify blood cells in space. Expedition 34 also received two supply vessels during their sojourn, the Progress 50 and SpaceX’s second commercial cargo delivery. Their mission patch features these key events, being shaped like a cargo ship and boasting the motto “Off the Earth…For the Earth.”

On March 13, Ford had transferred command of the station to his successor, Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield. Hadfield and his fellow crewmates Roman Romanenko and Tom Marshburn will be on their own until their complement arrives on March 28 after testing out the first crewed flight to fly from Earth to ISS in six hours, down from two days. Expedition 35/36 cosmonaut Pavel Vinogradov will be taking his third spaceflight, having flown on Mir-24 and ISS Expedition 13. Cosmonaut Aleksandr Misurkin  is on his first mission and NASA astronaut Chris Cassidy has prior experience on STS-127. Vinogradov will command Expedition 36 beginning in May. In addition to continuing their predecessors’ research, this Expedition will be preparing for addition of a new Russian module and are expected to receive Orbital Sciences’ first commercial cargo demonstration mission. 

Below, Expedition 34 ends as Ford, Novitskiy, and Tarelkin bid farewell to their crewmates and depart in their Soyuz TMA-06M: