Article Posted on : - Apr 21, 2025

The Soyuz MS-26 spacecraft lands in a remote area near the town of Zhezkazgan, Kazakhstan, with NASA astronaut Don Pettit and Roscosmos cosmonauts Alexey Ovchinin and Ivan Vagner aboard, Sunday, April 20, 2025. Image credit: AP/PTI

MOSCOW (AP): A Soyuz capsule carrying two Russians and one American from the International Space Station landed Sunday in Kazakhstan, ending their seven-month research assignment.

According to Russian space agency Roscosmos, the capsule carrying Roscosmos cosmonauts Alexey Ovchinin and Ivan Vagner and astronaut Don Pettit of US space agency NASA landed on the Kazakh steppe near the city of Zhezkazgan at 6:20 a.m. Roscosmos said the parachute-assisted landing was a trouble-free descent.

The trio returned after spending 220 days in space and orbiting the Earth 3,520 times, NASA said in a statement. The agency noted that, coincidentally, Pettit celebrated his 70th birthday on Sunday.

NASA said it was following its routine postlanding medical checks, and that the crew will return to the recovery staging area in Karaganda, Kazakhstan. Pettit will then board a NASA plane bound for the agency's Johnson Space Center in Houston, while Roscosmos said Ovchinin and Vagner will depart for a training base in Star City, Russia.

On Friday, Ovchinin handed over command of the ISS to Japanese astronaut Takuya Onishi in a change of command ceremony.