British astronaut Tim Peake, 2 others back on Earth after 186 days in space
Three space explorers, including the European Space Agency's first British astronaut on the International Space Station, are back on Earth after spending 186 days living and working in space.
British astronaut Tim Peake, NASA's Tim Kopra and Russian cosmonaut Yuri Malenchenko landed in a remote part of Kazakhstan on Saturday morning at 10:15 a.m. BST after undocking from the Space Station and speeding back home.
The three crewmembers came back to Earth tucked inside a Russian Soyuz spacecraft designed to withstand the intense heat created when coming back into the planet's atmosphere.
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In all, it took about six hours to get back to Earth from the time the three men left the Space Station.
Peake, Kopra and Malenchenko launched to orbit in December 2015, and in that time, they have performed hundreds of experiments and taken hundreds of pictures of Earth from orbit. (Peake also ran a marathon while in space.)
Kopra and Peake also tweeted... a lot.
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Once on the ground, crewmembers go through a battery of medical and physical exams to see how they're adjusting to being in a gravity environment for the first time in about half a year.
And it's probably going to be quite an adjustment coming back to Earth. On the station, astronauts and cosmonauts see about 16 sunrises and sunsets per day, and float around in the weightlessness of the orbiting outpost.
The three crewmembers left three other colleagues behind on the Space Station.
NASA's Jeff Williams and cosmonauts Oleg Skripochka and Alexey Ovchinin are holding down the fort on the orbiting space laboratory until three new crewmembers fly up to get the station running at full steam again on July 6.
On a different note, now that Peake's on the ground, he can probably order that pizza Papa John's promised him.
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Miriam Kramer worked as a staff writer for Space.com for about 2.5 years before joining Mashable to cover all things outer space. She took a ride in weightlessness on a zero-gravity flight and watched rockets launch to space from places around the United States. Miriam received her Master's degree in science, health and environmental reporting from New York University in 2012, and she originally hails from Knoxville, Tennessee. Follow Miriam on Twitter at @mirikramer.
