U.S. astronaut Scott Kelly and Russian cosmonaut Mikhail Kornienko have returned to Earth after a historic 340-day mission aboard the International Space Station. The pair landed in the desolate and frozen Kazakhstan after checking out of the International Space Station three and a half hours earlier.
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Their Soyuz capsule parachuted onto the central Asian steppes.
Kelly and the two Russian cosmonauts who will travel with him back to Earth are saying their goodbyes to colleagues at the International Space Station.
As revealed by their crewmate Tim Peake of the European Space Agency, Kelly and Kornienko had LEGO minifigures of themselves and their crewmates on the station, courtesy of the British astronaut.
During a press conference shortly after his return, Kelly, who had completed his fourth space mission, was asked whether he would take another trip.
Astronaut Scott Kelly is on his way back to Earth to end an unprecedented yearlong mission in space for NASA.
Kelly and Kornienko spent 340 consecutive days in space, circling the world 5,440 times on a mission that began last March.
Russia’s Soyuz TMA-18M space capsule carrying the International Space Station (ISS) crew of USA astronaut Scott Kelly and Russian cosmonauts Mikhail Kornienko and Sergei Volkov lands in a remote area outside the town of Dzhezkazgan, Kazakhstan, on March 2, 2016.
Kelly, who was raised and schooled in West Orange, is the first American to spend more than 11 months in the weightlessness of space.
The trio have now been taken for routine medical tests before they are allowed to meet their friends and families.
As he relinquished command of the space station Monday, Kelly noted that he and Kornienko “have been up here for a really, really long time” and have been jokingly telling one another, “We did it!” and “We made it!” “Talk about aliens. He’s been off the planet for a year”, Mark Kelly joked via Twitter.
The world’s longest missions were carried out by four Soviet-era cosmonauts aboard the now-defunct Mir space station, including a flight from January 1994 to March 1995, spanning almost 438 days by record holder Valeri Polyakov, a physician.
“A really smart person said to me one time, ‘Teamwork makes the dreamwork in spaceflight, ‘ and spaceflight is the biggest team sport there is”, Kelly said Monday.
The brothers will be reunited at Ellington Airport near Johnson Space Center in Houston late Wednesday. Their mileage: 144 million miles.
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When the chute first opens astronauts say they go nearly head over heels as the capsule twists and turns around.
