A crew of four astronauts, including a Russian, left the International Space Station (ISS) on Monday to return to the United States after a roughly six-month mission in orbit.
The crew joined the ISS at the end of August aboard the capsule Dragon by SpaceX for a routine NASA mission called Crew-7.
The mission, led by American astronaut Jasmin Moghbeli, includes Dane Andreas Mogensen, Japanese Satoshi Furukawa and Russian cosmonaut Konstantin Borissov.
In her departure speech on Sunday, Jasmin Moghbeli, for whom this was the first mission in space, praised the international cooperation that made it possible to build the ISS after the end of the Cold War in the 1990s. “It’s a testament to what’s possible when we work together,” she said.
Despite diplomatic tensions between Washington and Moscow since the start of the war in Ukraine, cooperation between the US and Russian space agencies continues on the ISS – one of the few areas of cooperation still ongoing between the two countries.
The four astronauts are expected at sea near the coast of Florida as of 9:35 GMT (5:35 a.m. Quebec) Tuesday morning. During the six months spent in space, the crew conducted scientific work, such as investigating how microgravity, which accelerates aging, affects liver regeneration.
This is the seventh regular crew rotation mission for NASA by SpaceX, billionaire Elon Musk’s company. Crew-8which took over, arrived at the ISS on March 5.
NASA pays SpaceX for this service, which has reduced its reliance on Russia to transport crews to the International Space Station since the end of US space shuttle flights in 2011.