Back to Earth

Soyuz 27S landed last night smack in the middle of the Kazakhstan winter. The temperature was in the single digits, with a wind chill of -20. Welcome back to Earth, guys!

They landed about a half hour before sunrise, which is usually not done since NASA’s generic ground rules and constraints dictate that Soyuz landings happen between sunrise and sunset. But with the  launch manifest a little wonky due to the impacts of the Progress failure in August, this flight ended up staying in orbit about a week longer than they were originally scheduled to avoid decrewing the ISS and provide enough time for the returning crew to hand over to the crew that just arrived last Tuesday. Delaying a week meant that they would now land just before sunrise — so the ISS Program actually had to sign a waiver allowing them to break those ground rules for this specific case.

(Don’t worry, they made sure it was ok before signing the waiver willy nilly.)

Reentering in darkness and landing in twilight resulted in some pretty cool videos and photos that you don’t get when they land during the day. First of all, the ISS crew was able to set up a camera on the station to record part of the entry. That’s the first thing you see in this video:

[iframe width=”640″ height=”360″ src=”http://www.youtube.com/embed/fORo5XeK4DU” frameborder=”0″ allowfullscreen]

SO COOL, right? As you watch, you can see the plasma trail separate into a couple different blobs. The forward bright spot is the descent module, and the bright spot behind it is the orbital module and instrumentation module burning up (by design) in the atmosphere. The descent module does generate some lift since it’s a controlled entry, so it flies a bit farther downrange.

(source)

One of NASA’s staff photographers also got some great shots. I love the one above. You can see the Soyuz parachute lying on the ground, and the capsule is visible to the right as a small black dot. The larger black “splotch” is where the capsule originally landed — the retrorockets that fire just before impact scorched the ground. I love the headlights of all the recovery and search-and-rescue vehicles, and how they’re circling the capsule.

(source)

This shot of the capsule as the recovery guys prepare to get the crew out is also really cool. You can see how cold it was from how bundled up all of the recovery guys are, and I love that the helicopter in the background is just landing. The large round opening that you can see directly into is the parachute compartment. The hatch is actually on the side — well, really it’s on the top, but the vehicle landed on its side. I read somewhere that Mike Fossum had previously said that he didn’t think landing on their side would be too awful, since at least you then wouldn’t have to hoist yourself up through the hatch above your head.

It was a nice landing and I’m happy that 27S is home safely!