Three astronauts from the US, Russia and Japan have left the International Space Station on Saturday aboard a Russian Soyuz capsule and made a touchdown back on Earth. Anatoly Ivanishin, station commander of the Russian space agency, Kate Rubins from the United State's NASA, and Japanese astronaut Takuya Onishi left the station at 8:35 p.m. EDT/0035 Sunday GMT as shown on NASA's TV broadcast.
It was Rubins and Onishi's first mission in space, while Ivanishin undertook a five-month mission at the ISS five years ago.
"I'm kind of reluctant to close the hatch," Ivanishin said at the change-of-command ceremony on Friday. He turned over the space station command to US astronaut Shane Kimbrough. "The time is very special here ... I didn't have time to know what's going on our planet, and maybe it's for the better. On the space station, you live in a very friendly, very good environment," he added.
As scheduled, the capsule landed Sunday morning near Dzhezkazgan on the treeless Central Asian steppes. Helicopters were closely tracking it as it wafted through partly cloudy skies under a parachute marked in red and white concentric circles. The astronauts sat on the steppes in their capsule seats and readjusted to gravity after about 4 months in weightless conditions. They were then taken to a nearby hospital for initial examination.
Kate Rubins of NASA was the woman aboard the ISS since Italian Samantha Cristoforetti returned to Earth. She holds the record for the longest single spaceflight by a woman (199 days) in June last year. Another American, Peggy Whitson, 56, will join French astronaut Thomas Pesquet and Russian cosmonaut Oleg Novitskiy from the Baikonur Cosmo drome at the space lab on November 17.
While on mission, Rubins successfully sequenced samples of mouse, virus and bacteria DNA while Earth scientists simultaneously sequenced identical samples. According to the US space agency, the experiment could help identify possible dangerous microbes on the space station and diagnose illnesses in space.
