Expedition 46 Astronauts Return To Earth, Key Mars Research On

WASHINGTON: After conducting some key research on the International Space Station (ISS) to send humans to Mars in the near future, astronaut Scott Kelly and cosmonauts Mikhail Kornienko and Sergey Volkov safely returned to Earth on Wednesday.

After undocking from the ISS to begin their voyage home, they performed a separation burn to increase the distance from the station before executing a four-minute, 49-second deorbit burn and landed southeast of Dzhezkazgan, Kazakhstan.

All three participated in field tests immediately after landing.

Kelly will conduct functional task tests once he is back at NASA's Johnson Space Center which will assess how the human body responds to living in microgravity for such a long time.

Understanding how astronauts recover after long-duration spaceflight is a critical piece in planning for missions to deep space missions.

The Expedition 47 crew members, commander Tim Kopra of NASA, Yuri Malenchenko of Roscosmos and Tim Peake of ESA (European Space Agency), will continue research and maintenance aboard the station.

They will be joined on March 18 by three additional crew members -- NASA astronaut Jeff Williams and Russian cosmonauts Oleg Skriprochka and Alexey Ovchinin.

Kelly and Kornienko were launched to the space station on March 27 last year for their one-year mission.

Kelly surpassed the previous record for time spent in space by a US astronaut on October 16, 2015.

After his return, he will have spent a total of 520 days in space across four space missions.

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