Three crew members of the International Space Station’s Expedition 55 programme have safely returned to Earth after 168 days aboard the orbiting station.
Nasa astronaut Scott Tingle, Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency’s (JAXA) Norishige Kanai and Russian space agency Roscosmos’s cosmonaut Anton Shkaplerov, landed on the southeast of Dzhezkazgan in Kazakhstan.
It was the first mission for Tingle and Kanai, and Shkaplerov logged 532 days in space.
During their stay at the ISS, the crew completed a number of experiments, such as materials testing, a study of the effect of microgravity on bone marrow and research into plant growth in space.
They also received four cargo spacecraft delivering supplies and experiments.
The spacecrafts included a SpaceX Dragon probe that arrived at the station in December last year, followed by another Dragon in April and Orbital ATK’s Cygnus resupply spacecraft in May this year.
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By GlobalDataIn February, a Russian Progress cargo craft reached the ISS.
Tingle and Kanai also performed separate spacewalks to carry out work on parts of the station’s Canadarm2 robotic arm.
Shkaplerov conducted the longest spacewalk in Russian space programme history by remaining outside the station for eight hours and 13 minutes.
The Expedition 56 crew members, including Nasa’s Drew Feustel and Ricky Arnold and Roscosmos’s Oleg Artemyev, are expected to operate the station and prepare for the arrival of three new members on 8 June 2018.
The new members, including Nasa’s Serena Auñón-Chancellor, the European Space Agency’s Alexander Gerst, and Roscosmos’s Sergey Prokopyev, will be launched on 6 June from Baikonur, Kazakhstan.
