Three crew inside a Russian Soyuz capsule parachuted safely back to Earth yesterday after nearly six months on the International Space Station.
US astronaut Mike Fossum, Japan's Satoshi Furukawa and Russian cosmonaut Sergei Volkov, below, landed shortly before sunrise on the snowbound steppe of central Kazakhstan.
"The landing was great. Everything's good," said Lt-Col Volkov, giving a thumbs-up after he was extracted from the Soyuz TMA-02 capsule which was blackened by the extreme temperatures on re-entry to the Earth's atmosphere.
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