Back home: NASA astronaut Mark Vande Hei returns to Earth aboard Russian Soyuz MS-19

After nearly a year of floating in space on board the International Space Station, a NASA astronaut has returned to Earth.

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Mark Vande Hei returned from the ISS on a Russian Soyuz MS-19 spacecraft, along with cosmonauts Anton Shkaplerov and Pyotr Dubrov, CNN reported.

Vande Hei and Dubrov launched together in April 2021 and have spent 355 days in space, completing 5,680 orbits of Earth and more than 150 million miles.

The longest anyone has been in space was more than 437 days, a record held by Russian doctor Valeri Polyakov, according to the European Space Agency.

Vande Hei now holds the record for the longest spaceflight by an American astronaut, breaking Scott Kelly’s 340 days, CNN reported.

They landed in Kazakhstan at 7:28 a.m. EDT on Wednesday, The Washington Post reported.

The Soyuz landed upright, but the weather gave the crew an extra ride as winds got hold of the parachute pulling the capsule to its side which is not unusual, , the Post reported,.

Russian mission control posted an image of a screen reading “Welcome back, Mark!” written in both English and Russian, CNN reported.

After landing, Vande Hei, Shkaplerov and Dubrov had a health check and a two-hour helicopter ride. Vande Hei was expected to return to the U.S. on a Gulfstream jet after a refueling stop in Germany. The cosmonauts will be going back to their base in Star City, Russia.

NASA said it will continue to work closely with Russian space agency Roscosmos despite the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Both agencies said that their joint operations “continue to go well” earlier this month after Roscosmos chief Dmitry Rogozin made some inflammatory social media posts directed at the U.S., including one that seemed to threaten that Vande Hei would be left in space, CNN reported.

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Back on Earth In this photo taken from video footage released by Roscosmos Space Agency, the Russian Soyuz MS-19 space capsule lands, southeast of the Kazakh town of Zhezkazgan, Kazakhstan, Wednesday, March 30, 2022. The Soyuz MS-19 capsule landed upright in the steppes of Kazakhstan on Wednesday with NASA astronaut Mark Vande Hei, Russian Roscosmos cosmonauts Anton Shkaplerov and Pyotr Dubrov. (Roscosmos Space Agency via AP) (AP)

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