“Undocking has been completed,” Moscow Mission Control said.
Rubio, who is 47 and on his first space flight, is returning to Earth with Russian cosmonauts Sergei Prokopyev, 48, and Dmitry Petelin, 40.
Shortly after entering the atmosphere, it will open a parachute and, at 11:17 GMT, will land in a grassland in Kazakhstan, about 148 km (91 mi) southeast of the city of Zhezkazghan.
They were delayed six months in their return because their original spacecraft sprang a leak so a replacement had to be sent to bring them back. This gave the two Russians and Rubio an unexpectedly extended mission of 371 days in orbit.
On September 11, Rubio surpassed the previous NASA record of 355 consecutive days in space held by now-retired American astronaut Mark Vande Hei. Rubio is also the first American to spend an entire year in space.
Although Rubio broke the American record, he and his Russian colleagues are far from the Russian record.
Valery Polyakov, a Russian, holds the world record for the longest space flight ever – 437 consecutive days and 18 hours – during the Mir space station mission between January 1994 and March 1995. Polyakov died last September at the age of 80.
(Reporting by Guy Faulconbridge in Moscow and Steve Gorman in Los Angeles; Editing by Mark Trevelyan and Gareth Jones)
Disclaimer: This report is automatically generated from Reuters news service. ThePrint takes no responsibility for its content.
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