MOSCOW, July 26. /TASS/. The return vehicle of the Soyuz MS-28 manned spacecraft will land in Kazakh steppes on Sunday afternoon to bring back to the Earth the participants of the 74th long-term expedition to the ISS, Roscosmos cosmonauts Sergey Kud-Sverchkov (TASS’ special correspondent on the ISS), Sergey Mikayev, and NASA astronaut Christopher Williams, Roscosmos said.

"The landing of the descent vehicle of the Soyuz MS-28 transport manned spacecraft will take place on July 26 in Kazakhstan. The crew includes participants of the completed 74th long-term expedition to the ISS: Hero of Russia, Roscosmos cosmonaut Sergey Kud-Sverchkov, Roscosmos cosmonaut Sergey Mikayev, and NASA astronaut Christopher Williams," the state corporation said in a statement.

The ship's undocking from the Rassvet module is scheduled for 10:03 a.m. Moscow time (07:03 a.m. GMT).

After that, Soyuz MS-28 will go into autonomous flight, at about 12:32 a.m. Moscow time (09:32 a.m. GMT) it will turn on the engines for braking and descend from orbit. The household and instrument-assembly compartments will separate from the lander - they will burn up in the dense layers of the atmosphere.

When the lander with the crew enters the dense layers, it will begin aeroballistic braking. As a result, a plasma cloud with a temperature of about 2,000 degrees will be formed around it, so after landing, the heat shield layer will be black and burnt in places. The plasma cloud will also make communication with the ship's crew difficult for several minutes.

Further braking will happen with the help of parachutes. At a height of less than a meter to the ground, the Soyuz MS-28 will activate soft landing engines. The lander is expected to contact earth near the city of Zhezkazgan in Kazakhstan. On the ground, the crew will be met by an emergency and technical group, which will include officials of Roscosmos, Russia’s Federal Air Transport Agency Rosaviatsiya, the Cosmonaut Training Center (CPC), Energia Corporation, the Russian Defense Ministry, the Federal Medical-Biological Agency (FMBA) of Russia, as well as the Institute of Biomedical Problems of the Russian Academy of Sciences and NASA.

After extraction from the lander, the crew will be examined by doctors, after which the Russian astronauts will go for rehabilitation at the CPC, and the US astronaut to his home country.

The Soyuz MS-28 manned transport spacecraft was launched from the Baikonur cosmodrome on November 27, 2025 carrying Kud-Sverchkov, Mikayev, and Williams. During the flight, the crew conducted many scientific studies and experiments. Mikayev and Kud-Sverchkov performed one spacewalk, during which the equipment of the Solntse-terahertz device was installed, and a cassette of the Ekran-M experiment on the Nauka module was dismantled. In addition, the astronauts took the Biorisk experiment container from the Poisk module.

Before Kud-Sverchkov's departure, Roscosmos cosmonaut Anna Kikina, who became the agency's eighth special correspondent on the station, took over the leadership of the TASS office on the ISS.