Three members of the International Space Station crew returned safely to Earth on Saturday with a Russian Soyuz spacecraft, the Russian space agency Roscosmos reported.
The MS-17 Soyuz spacecraft carrying NASA astronaut Kate Rubins, a microbiologist who in 2016 became the first person to sequence DNA in space, and Russian cosmonauts Sergey Ryzhikov and Sergey Kud-Sverchkov landed in Kazakhstan at 0455 GMT.
The three were at the space station in mid-October 2020.
Their mission was the last planned Russian flight carrying a member of the US crew, marking the end of a long dependency, as the US renews its own ability to launch the crew in an effort to reduce the costs of sending astronauts into space.
Our standards: Thomson Reuters’ principles of trust.