DUBAI 4 October 2019: Al Mansoori returned to earth aboard the Soyuz MS-12, along with Nick Hague and Aleksey Ovchinin, who were at the ISS since March 2019.
MBRSC explained that the undocking took place on 3rd October, around 3.5 hours before the touchdown on Earth.
The spacecraft began the deorbit burn to ensure that its speed reached 128 metres per second. After two and a half hours in solo flight, when the Soyuz was around half an orbit from its landing site, the spacecraft oriented itself, tail first, in preparation for a braking manoeuvre, over the Southern Pacific and the Atlantic, near the southern tip of South America.
MBRSC said that, 30 minutes before landing, the three modules of the Soyuz MS-12 separated at an altitude of 140 kilometres: the descent module with the crew headed for landing, while the two other compartments burned up in the atmosphere. At that point, the cover of the parachute container was jettisoned, the main parachute opened at an altitude of 10.7 kilometres, and the braking parachute was jettisoned. When the main parachute was fully deployed, the reentry capsule entered a stable descent with a speed of around 7.2 metres per second.
At an altitude of between 1.1 and 0.8 metres from Earth, the Kaktus altimeter issued a command for the firing of the braking solid motors, DMP, and a giant parachute of 10,767 m2 area launched to slow down the speed of the spacecraft to 7m/sec. The spectacular firing took place around 0.7 metres above the surface, reducing the descent speed of the capsule to between 1.5 metres per second, leading to a smooth and quiet touchdown, north east of Baikonur Cosmodrome.
