MOSCOW, September 24. /TASS/. The crew of the Soyuz MS-17 spacecraft, scheduled to leave for the International Space Station (ISS) on October 14, will be brough back to Earth on April 9, 2021, the crew’s commander, Sergei Ryzhikov, told a news conference on Thursday.

"Under the current plan the duration of our mission is 177 days. We are to be back on April 9 next year, if nothing changes," he said.

During the space mission the Ryzhikov-led crew is to make two spacewalks: one for systems maintenance and readying a new airlock for future spacewalks, and the other, to make preparations for docking with the multifunctional laboratory module Nauka.

Earlier, Roscosmos said the space expedition will last 186 days.

The new expedition is to go into space on a Soyuz-2.1a rocket. Roscosmos’ Sergei Ryzhikov and Sergei Kud-Sverchkov and NASA’s Kathleen Rubins are the main crew and Oleg Novitsky and Pyotr Dubrov, of Russia, and Mark Vande Hei, of the United States, the standby crew.