Three spacefliers from the International Space Station made a photogenic return to Earth today, touching down in the steppes of Kazakhstan.
The landing marked the end of a 186-day tour of duty for NASA astronaut Tim Kopra, Britain’s Tim Peake and Russia’s Yuri Malenchenko. The homeward journey began when the trio’s Russian Soyuz capsule undocked from the station at 10:52 p.m. PT Friday, leading up to the parachute-assisted descent through partly cloudy skies a little more than three hours later.
NASA photographer Bill Ingalls and the European Space Agency’s Stephane Corvaja captured some classic scenes of the homecoming from a Russian recovery helicopter, and later from the ground.
