LONDON: Three astronauts returned to Earth from the International space station following a stay aboard the orbiting outpost that lasted 199 days. Mission planners described the end of the mission, which took place at 9:44 a.m. EDT on June 11, as a textbook landing.
Expedition 43 was greeted on its return home by American and Russian space agencies. The Soyuz TMA-15M spacecraft came down in an area of Kazakhstan featuring a steppe landscape located 92 miles southeast of Zhezkazgan.
“Everything worked by the second, step by step, the guys were great,” Anton Shkaplerov, one of the returning astronauts, told reporters following the end of the mission.
The capsule, charred from its fiery journey through the atmosphere, landed upright, allowing search and recovery teams to quickly reach the crew.
Shkaplerov, from Russia, was the first to leave the vehicle, followed by Samantha Cristoforetti of the European Space Agency. The last space traveler to leave the capsule was Expedition 43 Commander Terry Virts.
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