The Soyuz MS-22 spacecraft, which suffered a spectacular leak while docked with the International Space Station (ISS) in December, landed empty in Kazakhstan on Tuesday as planned, images from Russia’s space agency Roscosmos show.
The capsule landed in the steppes of this vast Central Asian country at 17:46 local time (11:46 GMT), according to TV show Roscosmos.
Roscosmos said in a statement that 218 kilograms of cargo, including the results of scientific experiments, were transported aboard the Soyuz MS-22, which landed southeast of the city of Jezkazgan (centre).
This spacecraft, originally intended to return American astronaut Frank Rubio and Russian cosmonauts Sergei Prokopiev and Dmitri Peteline to Earth, had suffered a spectacular coolant leak.
According to Moscow, this incident is due to the impact of a micrometeorite, which decided to send the MS-23 ship as a replacement.
The coolant leak had raised concerns about the temperature that could be reached inside the ship when it returns to Earth.
Launched in late September 2022, the three members of MS-22 were scheduled to return to Earth in late March, but will not be finally returned until next September.
A leak similar to December’s also affected another Russian spacecraft, the Progress MS-21 cargo ship, which had been docked with the ISS since October in mid-February. But this one was not intended to carry passengers and left last week.
The ISS is one of the few areas of cooperation between Moscow and Washington that has lasted since the start of the Russian offensive in Ukraine and the international sanctions that followed.