NEW YORK
Three International Space Station astronauts returned to Earth Thursday after spending 199 days in space, the U.S. space agency said.
Commander of Expedition 43, Terry Virts, and fellow crew members Samantha Cristoforetti and Anton Shkaplerov, landed their Soyuz TMA-15M spacecraft in Kazakhstan at 7.44 p.m. local time (1344GMT), NASA said in a press release.
The landing was originally planned for May 14, but was postponed because of a supply spaceship failure.
The delay allowed Cristoforetti, an Italian, to set the record for the most time in space on a single mission by a female astronaut.
The previous record had been logged by NASA astronaut Sunita "Suni" Williams in June 2007 with 194 days, 18 hours and 2 minutes while aboard the International Space Station.
This was Cristoforetti’s first flight into space.
The trio clocked almost 84 million miles during their time in space and conducted research and technology demonstrations, according to NASA.
They handed over command of the space station to cosmonaut Gennady Padalka of the Russian Federal Space Agency, it added.
