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Astronauts return after marathon ISS mission

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Astana, Kazakhstan: A Soyuz MS-03 spacecraft carrying French astronaut Thomas Pesquet and Russian cosmonaut Oleg Novitskiy landed on the Kazakh steppe on Friday, ending their marathon 196-day mission to the International Space Station.


Nasa TV showed recovery crews swiftly helping the pair out of the craft and whisking them away from the landing site as the sun began to set on a hot summer’s evening in central Kazakhstan.


The pair undocked as the International Space Station (ISS) orbited above the Chinese-Mongolian border, marking the beginning of a 400-kilometre descent back to Earth lasting just over three hours.


“All is well. The landing has taken place,” a spokesman for Russian mission control said after the landing at 8:10 pm local time (1410 GMT).


“All the operations for the descent from orbit and landing went to plan. The crew members feel well after returning to Earth,” mission control said in a statement.


First-time flyer Pesquet’s long-duration trip fell just shy of the record space mission for a European Space Agency astronaut set by Samantha Cristoforetti of Italy back in 2015.


“It’s been a fantastic adventure and amazing ride,” 39-year-old Pesquet tweeted a few hours before the undocking.


Former Russia Air Force pilot Oleg Novitskiy, 45, was completing his second mission to the ISS.


Pesquet and Novitskiy arrived at the station on November 20 for a six-month mission with American Peggy Whitson, who holds the Nasa record for cumulative time spent in space.


Novitskiy and Pesquet came home in a spacecraft that had one empty seat — a result of Roscosmos’s decision last year to temporarily reduce the Russian presence on the space station from three to two cosmonauts to cut costs.


Due to that decision, Nasa veteran Whitson did not join the pair on the journey home as originally planned, and will instead remain on the ISS until September after Nasa extended her stay.


French President Emmanuel Macron called Pesquet after the landing, telling him “bravo to you,” while the French astronaut told him “It’s going well, I’m getting used to gravity. Even just holding this telephone is difficult.”


Pesquet voted in the French elections from the orbital lab and is set to meet Macron once he completes post-mission work at the ESA astronaut centre in Cologne.


“We saw that he is very qualified, a real professional... with a great desire to work in space,” Yuri Malenchenko, a retired cosmonaut who worked with Pesquet in Russia’s Star City, where ISS astronauts and cosmonauts train for missions, said.


“These qualities were confirmed during the flight,” he added. — AFP


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