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ISS Crew Lands Safely in Kazakhstan with Space Station Hole Sample

The only crew of astonauts to have been temporarily stranded on the International Space Station has returned back to Earth on Wednesday, onboard a Soyuz capsule which landed in Kazakhstan.
ISS crew gets safely back to Earth 4 photos
Photo: NASA
ISS crew comes back to EarthISS crew comes back to EarthISS crew comes back to Earth
The crew that landed yesterday is comprised of NASA astronaut Serena Auñón-Chancellor, ESA astronaut Alexander Gerst and Roscomos cosmonaut Sergey Prokopyev. These three have been onboard the station through perhaps the most exciting months for the ISS.

Back in August, the space station experienced an oxygen leak, later determined to have been caused by a mysterious hole in the Soyuz MS-09 capsule.

As the investigation into the matter got underway, the Soyuz MS-10 was scheduled to take off in October and reach the station with two more people, part of the replacement crew for ones already onboard.

The launch was aborted mid-flight, due to the improper separation of one of the boosters, and the humans in orbit became stranded after the Russian space agency grounded all Soyuz launches.

Until the cause of the failure was somewhat clarified, the ISS crew had no way of knowing when they would be returning home. Luckily for them, Roscosmos moved swiftly and, even though they did not announce a clear cause of the failure, they cleared the launch of other Soyuz capsules.

As soon as the replacement crew arrived to the ISS, flight engineers Oleg Kononenko and Sergey Prokopyev conducted a spacewalk to collect samples from the damaged ISS module. What they scraped off the exterior of the capsule was sent back to Earth with the three astronauts.

In all, the astronauts that landed yesterday spent 197 days in space, circling the globe 3,152 times for a total distance of  83.3 million miles (134 million km).

While in space, they conducted hundreds of experiments in biology, biotechnology, physical science, and Earth science, looking for things like new cancer treatment methods and algae growth in space.
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About the author: Daniel Patrascu
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Daniel loves writing (or so he claims), and he uses this skill to offer readers a "behind the scenes" look at the automotive industry. He also enjoys talking about space exploration and robots, because in his view the only way forward for humanity is away from this planet, in metal bodies.
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