An American astronaut and two Russian cosmonauts have landed on the steppes of Kazakhstan. This concludes their 196-day space mission to the International Space Station, ISS.
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It was the first mission launched since the global coronavirus outbreak. The replacements of NASA astronaut Chris Cassidy and the Roscosmos cosmonauts Anatoli Ivanisjin and Ivan Vagner arrived at the International Space Station (ISS) a week ago.
Cassidy, Ivanisjin and Vagner landed on Thursday at around 5:00 am Belgian time with their Soyuz capsule, some 150 kilometers from the Kazakh city of Zjezkazgan. Images of the landing were broadcast by the Russian space agency Roskosmos.
‘Mama, I’m coming home’
Cassidy completed four spacewalks totaling 23 hours and 37 minutes, space agency NASA reports. “Expedition 63 has gone super fast,” says Cassidy. “We joked that there were only Mondays and Fridays and there was a great blur of time in between.”
Vagner then tweeted “Mama, I’m coming home.”
The three were exactly 196 days, four hours and 13 minutes from our planet and are now being replaced by astronaut Kathleen Rubins and cosmonauts Sergei Ryzhikov and Sergei Kud-Sverchkov.
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