Enlarge / NASA Astronaut Mark Vande Hei flashes a thumbs-up shortly after landing on Wednesday. (credit: NASA)
After more than a month of speculation, NASA astronaut Mark Vande Hei did in fact return to Earth inside a Russian Soyuz spacecraft Wednesday, on the dusty steppes of Kazakhstan.
The landing of the small descent module was nominal, with clear skies in Kazakhstan a couple of hours before local sunset. Soyuz Commander Anton Shkaplerov emerged first from the vehicle, followed by Flight Engineer Pyotr Dubrov, and then finally Vande Hei, who soon donned a pair of sunglasses and flashed a thumbs-up at the camera.
Dubrov and Vande Hei both flew a 355-day mission, having launched to the International Space Station on April 9, 2021. For Vande Hei, this set a US duration record for a single spaceflight. A Russian cosmonaut, Valeri Polyakov, holds the global record for such a mission, having spent 437 days on the Mir space station in the mid-1990s.
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