Cape Canaveral:
The first Canadian astronaut to command the International Space Station headed back to Earth with two crewmates on Monday, wrapping up a five-month mission aboard the orbital outpost.
Space station commander Chris Hadfield, NASA astronaut Tom Marshburn and Russian cosmonaut Roman Romanenko strapped themselves inside a Russian Soyuz capsule on Monday and departed the station shortly after 7 pm EDT (0438 IST) as the ships sailed 255 miles (410 km) over eastern Mongolia.
"It's just been an extremely fulfilling and amazing experience," Hadfield radioed to flight controllers earlier on Monday.
The mission included an impromptu spacewalk on Saturday to fix an ammonia coolant leak that had cropped up two days earlier. Without the repair, NASA likely would have had to cut back the station's ongoing science experiments to save power. The cooling system dissipates heat from electronics on the station's solar-powered wing panels.
During a spacewalk, Marshburn and crewmate Chris Cassidy, who remains aboard the station, replaced a suspect ammonia coolant pump, apparently resolving the leak. Engineers will continue to monitor the system for several weeks to make sure there are no additional problems.
Hadfield made history on Monday when he released the first music video shot in space, turning an astronaut into an overnight music sensation with his zero-gravity version of David Bowie's hit "Space Oddity.
Hadfield, Marshburn and Romanenko, who blasted off 146 days ago, are due to parachute to a landing in Kazakhstan at 10:31 pm EDT (0901 IST Tuesday). Their mission was the 35th expedition aboard the space station, a permanently staffed, 100 billion dollars laboratory for biomedical, materials science, technology demonstrations and other research.
Their replacements are due to launch from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on May 28. Until then, a skeleton crew commanded by Pavel Vinogradov and including NASA astronaut Cassidy and cosmonaut Alexander Misurkin will keep the station operating.
The crew's return to Earth comes on the 40th anniversary of the launch of the first US space station, Skylab. Three crews lived and worked on the relatively short-lived Skylab between May 1973 and February 1974. The project helped NASA prepare for in-flight research aboard the space shuttles and the International Space Station, which was constructed in orbit beginning in 1998.
The outpost, which is scheduled to remain in orbit until at least 2020, has been permanently staffed since November 2000.
© Thomson Reuters 2013