A Soyuz MS-03 spacecraft carrying French astronaut Thomas Pesquet and Russian cosmonaut Oleg Novitskiy landed on the Kazakh steppe 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 (250-mile) descent back to Earth lasting just over three hours.
"All is well. The landing has taken place," a spokesman for Russian mission control told AFP 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.
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