Astronauts who were at the International Space Station arrived on Earth safely on Wednesday morning after undocking from the station following 166 days in space.
American Chris Cassidy and Russians Pavel Vinogradov and Alexander Misurkin emerged from the capsule with smiles on an unusually sunny day in Kazakhstan, a country on the border of Russia.
Live coverage from NASA, the U.S. space agency, first showed the shuttle parachuting to a safe and punctual landing. Helicopters were then flown to the landing site, where medical and flight crews helped the three men disembark.
The capsule undocked from the space station for a flight to Earth that took just over three hours.
The three men had gone into space from the Baikonur cosmodrome on March 29.
Each of the men was carried to reclining chairs, where they spent several minutes in order to acclimatize to Earth’s gravity.
A NASA TV commentator said that crew members Misurkin and Cassidy would be taken to a medical center, where they will undergo various tests that could provide information for future flights. Vinogradov, at 60 the oldest human ever to land in a Soyuz vehicle, would not take part in the same experiments.
During their time in space, the three astronauts completed 2,656 orbits of the Earth, traveling more than 70 million miles. Each completed at least one spacewalk while in space.
The three astronauts left the International Space Station (ISS) on September 10 at 7:37 p.m. EDT and landed in Kazakhstan at 10:58 p.m. EDT (8:58 a.m. local time).
The day before they left, Vinogradov handed over control of the station to Russian flight engineer Fyodor Yurchikhin.
Yurchikhin, Karen Nyberg of NASA and the Italian Luca Parmitano are tending the ISS until the arrival of a three-person crew scheduled to launch from Kazakhstan on Sept. 25.
Three astronauts--Russians Oleg Kotov, an Air Force colonel, and Sergey Ryazanskiy, a scientist; and NASA’s Mike Hopkin, a Missouri native and colonel in the U.S. Air Force--are preparing in Kazakhstan to launch on September 25. They'll arrive at the ISS just six hours later, a faster trip than usual.
The ISS launched on October 31, 2000, and has been visited by 204 individuals from multiple countries. Many of the astronauts (Russia calls them cosmonauts) are from the United States or Russia. The station typically has six people living in it. Three are Russians and the other three are usually two NASA astronauts and one astronaut from a European country, Canada, or Japan.
The Soyuz is the only means for international astronauts to reach the orbiting laboratory since the decommissioning of the U.S. shuttle fleet in 2011. There are plans to shuttle astronauts from the United States in the future using private vehicles.
The astronauts land in the video below
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The astronauts emerge from the helicopter that flew them from the landing spot and arrive at the airport in Karaganda, Kazakhstan in the video below.
The astronauts say farewell to the other three astronauts on September 10 before disembarking in the video below.
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The Associated Press contributed to this report.
