The spacecraft was a refurbished Soyuz that had served as a backup for the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project (ASTP) mission the previous year.

Cosmonauts Valery Bykovsky and Vladimir Aksyonov spent a week in orbit photographing the surface of the Earth with a specially-built camera.

The orbiting Salyut 5 space station was at the standard 51.7° inclination, which led some observers to conclude that this solo Soyuz mission was chiefly intended to observe NATO's Exercise Teamwork, taking place in Norway, well above 51.0° latitude and therefore outside good visual range of the space station.

The mission's stated objectives were to "check and improve scientific and technical methods and means of studying geological features of the Earth's surface in the interests of the national economies of the Soviet Union and the German Democratic Republic".

The camera had six lenses, four visible light and two infrared, which imaged a preselected 165 km (103 mi)-wide strip of the Earth's surface.

The last full day had the crew focus on East Germany, where an Antonov An-30 aircraft was flying carrying an identical camera to the one aboard Soyuz 22.

[3] They also re-photographed Central Asia, Kazakhstan, eastern Siberia, and the southwestern USSR in order to compare images with those taken earlier in the mission.

One of the tasks the crew undertook was to dismantle the camera in order to remove its color filters needed to calibrate the images back on Earth.