Three astronauts from the United States, Russia and Japan on Friday successfully completed a rare nighttime landing on Earth in the wintry Kazakh steppe after returning from the International Space Station.
“They have landed safely and the recovery team have found them. Everything is according to plan,” a spokesman for Russian space agency Roscosmos told AFP.
NASA’s Kjell Lindgren, Japanese astronaut Kimiya Yui and Russian cosmonaut Oleg Kononenko parachuted down to Earth in their Soyuz capsule in darkness at 7:18 pm local time (1318 GMT) in windy conditions.
“What an amazing experience,” Lindgren said as he was monitored by medics on the snow-covered steppe in televised footage.
The trio blasted off to the ISS from Russia’s Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan in July, spending 141 days in space.
Their landing was the first night landing of a Soyuz team since November 2012 and only the sixth ever, adding an extra challenge to the recovery operation.
“Of course, this makes things more complicated but our recovery teams are trained to work day and night in all kinds of weather conditions, so this is not a problem,” Mission Control spokesman Sergei Talalasov told AFP.
Crew captain Kononenko has now logged a total of 533 days in space while it was Yui and Lindgren’s first time on the ISS.
“They arrived in space like baby birds barely able to fly and now they soar home as eagles. Great job Kjell and Kimiya!” tweeted NASA’s Scott Kelly, ISS commander, as his colleagues made their way home.
Their landing marks the end of Expedition 45 to the ISS, with three new astronauts set to blast off for the ISS in their Soyuz TMA-19M spacecraft on Tuesday.
Space travel has been one of the few areas of international cooperation between Russia and the West that has not been completely destroyed by the Ukraine crisis.
The ISS space laboratory has been orbiting the Earth at roughly 28,000 kilometres per hour since 1998.
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