Winding up stay of 127 days, a team comprising of three astronauts landed on Sunday night northeast of Arkalyk in the steppes of Kazakhstan with chilling temperature of 12 degrees Fahrenheit. Three astronauts- NASA’s Sunita Williams, Russian astronaut Yury Malenchenko and Aki Hoshide of Japan’s JAXA space agency – were carried in the Russian Soyuz capsule. The team has spent 125 days in space circling Earth onboard the International Space Station. It was told that the team left the space station in the command of NASA astronaut Kevin Ford. Till the time another crew team arrives, Ford along with his other teammates including Russian cosmonauts Oleg Novitskiy and Evgeny Tarelkin, would be running the outpost. “The crew is home,” NASA spokesman Rob Navias, while confirming the news. It was during mid-July that the crew set for the mission. It was further confirmed that the crew would be taken to the town of Kostanai, from where Malenchenko would go back to a Russian space facility outside Moscow, and Williams and Hoshide would board a Gulfstream jet for a trip to Houston, Texas. Though the capsule crossed its real landing site slightly by few miles, it was more or less a smooth land at 7:56 am local time, just one hour before the sunrise. If reports are to be referred, this is for the first time that a Soyuz spacecraft has landed at night.
