It took about three hours for the crew members, USA astronaut Jeff Williams and Russian cosmonauts Oleg Skripochka and Alexey Ovchinin, to return to earth on Wednesday.
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Expedition 48 Commander Jeff Williams, KD5TVQ, and two of his space station crewmates returned safely to Earth this week, following Williams’ US record-breaking mission aboard the ISS. This was the first space flight for Ovchinin, second for Skripochka and fourth for Williams.
The mission comes the same day a USA space probe was cleared for launch on Thursday to collect and return samples from an asteroid in hopes of learning more about the origins of life on Earth and perhaps elsewhere in the solar system, NASA said. They and their Soyuz TMA-20M spacecraft landed in Kazakhstan at approximately 9:14 pm EDT (7:14 am Wednesday local time at the landing site) after 172 days in space.
As the Soyuz was preparing to land, the spacecraft ran into a haze and was unable to be seen.
“No other United States astronaut has Jeff’s time and experience aboard the International Space Station”, Kirk Shireman, ISS Program manager at NASA’s Johnson Space Center, said. The astronaut from the U.S. commander Jeff Williams reported that he and his crewmates are healthy and in good spirits.
Williams was instrumental in preparing the station for the future arrival of US commercial crew spacecraft.
Williams and astronaut Kate Rubins, who will remain at the ISS with the Expedition 49 crew, installed the first International Docking Adapter during a spacewalk. Outfitted with a host of sensors and systems, the adapter’s main objective is to connect spacecraft bringing astronauts to the station in the future.
Williams and Rubins took another spacewalk together a week later to retract a defunct radiator and install two new high-definition cameras.
Before the crewmembers left the ISS, there were ceremonies performed like the change of command ceremony when Jeff Williams handed the control of the ISS to Anatoly Ivanishin.
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Shane Kimbrough of NASA and cosmonauts Sergey Ryzhikov and Andrey Borisenko of Roscosmos are scheduled to launch from Baikonur, Kazakhstan, on September 23.
