Any images of Soyuz DM on the ground?

Has anyone seen any images of the Soyuz
Descent Module on the ground -- in the mud --
near the river, where it landed?

There were some videophone images of crew extraction from the capsule
broadcast on nasa tv. Pretty dark but you could see that it was on
ground (not, say, knee deep deep water) and the crew were being taken
out the side of the capsule. I'm pretty sure it was upright, but with
shaky, low res camera and a black capsule in the dark, I'm not 100%.
Jim Oberg wrote:
Has anyone seen any images of the Soyuz
Descent Module on the ground -- in the mud --
near the river, where it landed?

Thanks, I'll review the tape again....

"hop" wrote
There were some videophone images of crew extraction from the capsule
broadcast on nasa tv. Pretty dark but you could see that it was on
ground (not, say, knee deep deep water) and the crew were being taken
out the side of the capsule. I'm pretty sure it was upright, but with
shaky, low res camera and a black capsule in the dark, I'm not 100%.

I'm getting more serious in my search for images of the Soyuz on the ground,
in the mud, near the small river....
I'll review the NASA TV tape for videophone images.

If the conditions were as bad as expected, would a 1-rev or 2-rev delay have
promised drier regions, along with daylight landing?

Does anyone know if the crew or their backups had ever trained for this
direct vertical extraction procedure?

Has any other long-duration crew EVER been directly extracted this way?


From today's On-Orbit Status Report (courtesy spaceref.com) -- maybe a
landing delay was judged imprudent with the questionable backup battery?
During last Sunday's undocking & landing of Soyuz TMA-5/9S, two
transient off-nominal events took place:

(1) Temporary inability by VC8 Vittori to pressurize his Sokol suit
after ingress (good ventilation, but no O2), remedied by re-donning the suit
to re-seat the seals, but delaying the undocking by 3 min 40 sec (and the
subsequent descent burn by 2 sec);

(2) Inability by Soyuz crew to reconnect the two Soyuz batteries to the
ISS, planned for one more hour of charging from the combined power system
after FGB port hooks had opened (Soyuz hooks still closed) due to an
overlooked computer inhibit. The reconnection was judged unnecessary, and
the descent & landing went off nominally. [Times: Undocking -- 2:44pm EDT;
deorbit burn -- 5:16pm (4m 19s); plasma trail visible to SAR helicopters --
5:50pm; landing -- 6:08pm; first crew member extracted -- 6:25pm.]

So there had been some videophone images of two of the crew
being pulled out, at the landing site, on NASA TV. I took some stills
off the screen. The ground appears firm, people walk on it without
feet sinking into any mud. Navias (JSC PAO) voice-overs that two
helicopters did land (there are at least a dozen different people in
various scenes, all of them clean), and that the crew was put onto
one of the helicopters for transport to Arkalyk. There's no indication
they were winched up to any helo hovering in mid-air. The Russian
account that said special deployable ladders were used by rescuers
to descend to the ground and extract the crew -- appears to be garbled.

Jim Oberg wrote:
they were winched up to any helo hovering in mid-air. The Russian
account that said special deployable ladders were used by rescuers
to descend to the ground and extract the crew -- appears to be
garbled.
My personal (and purely speculative) opinion, is that the ground was
judged too muddy for traditional symbolic / PAO activities. If you can
land two MI8s, I don't see why you couln't land a couple more (on the
sort of terrain common in the landing zone...)

FWIW, very nice pictures of the EXP 9 landing post landing activities
can be found at
http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/gallery/images/station/crew-9/ndxpage57.html

One thing worth noting is that a number of ground vehicles are normally
involved.

"Jim Oberg"
There's no indication
they were winched up to any
helo hovering in mid-air.

One report said that they were put into those lie-down type baskets and
hoisted out. Glad you found some pics, though.