Soyuz carries three station crew members back to Earth

A Russian Soyuz spacecraft carrying three space station crew members hurtled back to Earth Thursday, completing a fiery plunge back through the atmosphere before settling to a frigid touchdown on the snowy steppe of Kazakhstan to close out a 139-day mission. With Soyuz MS-05 commander Sergey Ryazanskiy at the controls in the charred descent module’s center seat, flanked on the left by NASA flight engineer Randy Bresnik and on the right by Italian astronaut Paolo Nespoli, the spacecraft landing near the town of Dzezkazgan at 3:37 a.m. EST (GMT-5; 2:37 p.m. local time). More

(Source: SpaceFlight Now - Dec 15)