AFP: Canadian ISS Astronaut Returns to Earth a Star
Canadian spaceman Chris Hadfield on Tuesday returned to Earth along with two other astronauts after a half-year mission to the International Space Station that saw him shoot to global stardom through his Twitter microblog.
Hadfield landed safely in the Kazakh steppe along with American Tom Marshburn and Russian Roman Romanenko aboard a Russian Soyuz-TMA capsule that had left the space station earlier Tuesday morning, Moscow mission control said.
Russian state television pictures showed the giant white parachute of the Soyuz capsule unfurling successfully after re-entry and the capsule then touching down in the Kazakh steppe, sending a plume of dust upwards into the sky.
The Soyuz touched down at 0231 GMT in the steppe south of the central Kazakh city of Karaganda. The Soyuz landed on its side rather than vertically, but this is a relatively common occurrence.
On a sunny spring morning, all three astronauts were then successfully extracted from the capsule by recovery teams who rushed to the scene in helicopters.