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ISS-64 crews practiced manually controlled deorbit

The crews have never used manually controlled deorbit since the beginning of the Soyuz family crewed spacecraft operation, however, they do have such opportunity meaning they need to know how to do it.

Before the flight, Soyuz MS-17 prime crew commander and flight engineer Sergey Ryzhikov and Sergey Kud-Sverchkov will need to take 10 manual deorbit training sessions, while the backup crew of Oleg Novitskiy and Pyotr Dubrov will take 15 trainings. One of the sessions is dynamic involving a centrifuge rotation to create G-loads.

‘When taking the 8th training, an operator has enough skills to perform the mode, so we can add G-loads,’ – says cosmonaut training leading specialist Dmitry Vovk.

Dynamic manual deorbit trainings are conducted using the TS-18 or TS-7 simulators based on the TsF-18 and TsF-7 centrifuges respectively. The sessions finalize with an exam with the examination board estimating the cosmonauts' performance. During the exam, an operator performs four modes: two dynamic and two static.

‘Manually controlled deorbit is a reserve mode used in case of the automatically controlled deorbit system failure,’ Vovk added.

In this case, the crew needs not only to manually deorbit but also land in the certain landing area for a timely recovery by the search and rescue teams, meaning the landing should occur no more than 30 km away from the calculated point.

According to the Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center instructors, the ISS-64 crew shows good results.

Soyuz MS-17 crewed spacecraft is scheduled to launch in October 2020. The ISS-64 prime crew includes Roscosmos cosmonauts Sergey Ryzhikov and Sergey Kud-Sverchkov and NASA astronaut Kathleen Rubins. The backup crew consists of Roscosmos cosmonauts Oleg Novitsky and Pyotr Dubrov, NASA astronaut Mark Vande Hei.