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Three crew members from the International Space Station get a view of the orbiting laboratory as they fly back to Earth in their Russian Soyuz space capsule.
By Miriam Kramer, SPACE.com
A Soyuz spacecraft brought an American astronaut and two Russian cosmonauts back to Earth on Friday after nearly five months of duty aboard the International Space Station.
Friday's trip occurred one day later than originally planned, due to freezing rain and fog at the Soyuz's landing site on the steppes of Kazakhstan in Central Asia. The fog was still thick when NASA astronaut Kevin Ford and Russian cosmonauts Oleg Novitskiy and Evgeny Tarelkin made their touchdown in the steppes of Kazakhstan shortly after 11 p.m. ET Friday.
The trio successfully undocked their Soyuz TMA-06M space capsule from the space station at 7:43 p.m. ET as both spacecraft sailed high over Mongolia. Their departure marked the end of the space station's Expedition 34 mission, and the beginning of the Expedition 35 increment by three other crew members who remained on the orbiting lab. [See photos from Expedition 34 space mission]
The three astronauts spent 142 days aboard the space station. This was Ford's second trip to space, but it marked the first trip for both Novitskiy and Tarelkin.
Novitskiy, Tarelkin and Ford said their goodbyes to Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield, NASA astronaut Tom Marshburn and Russian cosmonaut Roman Romanenko ? the three astronauts staying aboard the International Space Station. Expedition 35 officially began when the Soyuz spacecraft undocked from the orbiting laboratory.
On Wednesday, Ford ceremonially passed the command of the station to Hadfield, the first Canadian astronaut to lead an International Space Station crew. "They showed us how to live in space," Hadfield said of the three departing astronauts.
Hadfield, Romanenko and Marshburn will not be the sole residents of the station for long. Cosmonauts Pavel Vinogradov, Alexander Misurkin and NASA astronaut Chris Cassidy are expected to arrive at the station on the same day of their launch from Earth on March 28. If all goes as planned, it will mark the first time a Soyuz capsule has delivered a station crew to the orbiting laboratory in one day. Russia's Federal Space Agency tested the one-day flight profile during unmanned Progress cargo ship deliveries to the space station.
NASA has relied on Russia's Soyuz crafts to transport astronauts to and from low-Earth orbit since the retirement of the agency's shuttle program in 2011. NASA officials hope to eventually depend on privately built, unmanned and crewed spacecraft to carry people and cargo to and from the space station.
The $100 billion laboratory was built by space agencies representing Japan, Canada, the United States and Russia. International crews of astronauts have occupied the station continuously since 2000.
Follow Miriam Kramer @mirikramer and Google+. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook?and Google+. Original article on SPACE.com.
This report was updated by NBC News.
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This story was originally published on Fri Mar 15, 2013 8:40 PM EDT
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