A capsule carrying US, Russian and Italian astronauts from the International Space Station landed in Kazakhstan on Thursday after a five-month mission, a NASA TV live broadcast showed.
Smiling Ryazanskiy was the first to emerge from the capsule’s hatch, assisted by rescue workers. The trio’s departure has reduced to just three the crew of the ISS, a $100 billion lab that flies about 400 km above Earth. On December 17, NASA astronaut Scott Tingle, Anton Shkaplerov of Roscosmos and Norishege Kanai of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency will blast off from the Baikonur cosmodrome, also in Kazakhstan, to join the ISS crew.
