• An international trio heads for the space station after picture-perfect Soyuz launch
• Russians trace Soyuz rocket failure to a bent sensor; next crew to launch Dec. 3
• U.S.-Russian trio returns to Earth from space station on Sputnik anniversary
• Russian spacewalkers carve away at Soyuz spaceship to inspect plugged hole Russian cosmonaut Sergey Prokopyev, German astronaut Alexander Gerst, and NASA astronaut Serena Aunon-Chancellor have delivered to Earth the pieces of evidence that Russian state space corporation Roscosmos and investigators need for their probe into the microfracture found in the orbital module of the Soyuz MS-09 spacecraft in late August. However, since the Soyuz MS-09 Orbital Module will not survive reentry, Roscosmos was forced to perform a spacewalk, or EVA, to tear into the outer protective layer surrounding the hole to take photographs and collect samples that will aid in the still-ongoing official investigation of how the hole was drilled in the first place and how the undocumented ground repair occurred. However, the in-flight abort of the Soyuz MS-10 crew that was initially to join Expedition 57— NASA astronaut Nick Hague and Russian cosmonaut Aleksey Ovchinin — caused the outing to be pushed to Dec. 11, several days after Soyuz MS-11 launched with Russian cosmonaut Oleg Kononenko, NASA astronaut Anne McClain and Canadian Space Agency astronaut David Saint-Jacques. Also important to stress is that aside from the nominal reentry profile, the Soyuz’s Descent Module can also perform what is known as a ballistic style reentry – a much steeper and harsher reentry – designed to get a crew to the ground as quickly as possible if a systems or orientation issue is identified by the spacecraft’s computers.
Soyuz MS-09 lands safely on the steppe in Kazakhstan.