MOSKAU (dpa-AFX) - Three crew members of the International Space Station (ISS) Expedition 35 undocked from the orbiting laboratory and returned safely to Earth, wrapping up a mission lasting almost five months.
The Soyuz TMA-07M spacecraft undocked from the ISS at 7:08 p.m. EDT. Space Station Commander Chris Hadfield of the Canadian Space Agency, Soyuz Commander Roman Romanenko of the Russian Federal Space Agency (Roscosmos) and NASA Flight Engineer Tom Marshburn of the U.S. landed southeast of Dzhezkazgan in Kazakhstan at 8:31 a.m. on Tuesday local time, (10:31 p.m. EDT Monday).
Russian recovery teams were on hand to help the crew exit the Soyuz vehicle and adjust to gravity after 146 days in space.
The trio traveled almost 62 million miles while completing 2,336 orbits of Earth after arriving at the ISS on December 21, NASA said in a press release. They spent 144 days living and working aboard the ISS.
The undocking marked the end of Expedition 35 and the start of Expedition 36 under the command of Russian cosmonaut Pavel Vinogradov, who is scheduled to remain on the ISS with Flight Engineers Chris Cassidy (U.S.) and Alexander Misurkin (Russia) until September.
Three additional crew members -- Flight Engineers Karen Nyberg, Fyodor Yurchikhin, and Luca Parmitano - will join them on May 28.
Expedition 35 successfully completed the Binary Colloid Alloy Test-6, or BCAT-6, which took a look at how gasses and liquids come together and separate in space. Results from this experiment may lead to improvements in the shelf-life of household products, food and medicine.
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