MOSCOW, February 20. /TASS/. The damaged Soyuz MS-22 spaceship will be brought back to Earth in late March, Vladimir Solovyov, chief designer of Russian manned systems head of the flight of the Russian segment of the International Space Station (ISS), said on Monday.

According to Solovyov, the spaceship is expected to return to Earth in an unmanned regime in late March. "We can count on the success of this Soyuz’s return," he said in an interview with the Rossiya-24 television channel.

He stressed that any spacecraft with a damaged temperature control system cannot descend to the Earth in a manned regime because humans are active heat sources.

On December 15, 2022, the Soyuz MS-22 spacecraft docked to the ISS experienced a coolant leak on its external radiator. After analyzing the situation, Russia’s state commission made a decision to bring the damaged Soyuz spacecraft back to Earth in a crewless mode and return Roscosmos cosmonauts Sergey Prokopyev, Dmitry Petelin and NASA astronaut Frank Rubio whose mission has been prolonged for several months aboard the Soyuz MS-23 spaceship.

Russian space industry specialists have carried out special investigations and concluded that the Soyuz MS-22 was damaged by a sporadic micrometeoroid.