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.
After the space travelers were pulled off their space capsule, they were allowed to relax in semi-reclined chairs in the sunshine to reacclimate to life on Earth. Inside Russia's mission control center just outside Moscow, a big screen displayed the words "They have landed!"
Cristoforetti, a native of Italy, was onboard the space station when the first cappuccino machine arrived in orbit. During her stay in space, the Star Trek fan became the first person to ever wear a Starfleet uniform in space. This mission also gave her the record for the longest time ever spent in space by a woman.
The landing had been delayed for a month following an unsuccessful flight to resupply the space station on April 28. In less than two weeks, that vessel, containing thousands of pounds of supplies and experiments earmarked for the astronauts, re-entered the atmosphere of the Earth and fell into the Pacific Ocean.
"The remainder of the Expedition 44 crew, NASA astronaut Kjell Lindgren, Russian cosmonaut Oleg Kononenko and Kimiya Yui of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, is scheduled to launch from Baikonur, Kazakhstan, in late July," NASA officials wrote on the agency's website.
The crew returned to Earth with several dosimeters, devices used to measure radiation. Along with those are samples from the Study of the Impact of Long-Term Space Travel on the Astronauts' Microbiome investigation. This experiment was designed to test the effects of space flight on microbes commonly found in the human body. Samples are regularly taken of bacteria living in and on the bodies of residents of the ISS. Investigators hope this study will help develop methods to keep space travelers healthy during a long voyage to Mars or beyond.
The $100 billion space station is managed and occupied by a consortium of 15 nations from around the globe.
