A Russian Soyuz capsule with NASA's Randy Bresnik, Russia's Sergey Ryazanskiy and Paolo Nespoli of the European Space Agency descended under a red-and-white parachute and landed on schedule at 2:37 p.m. local time (0837 GMT; 3:37 a.m. EST) on the vast steppes outside of a remote town in Kazakhstan.
The three were extracted from the capsule within 20 minutes and appeared to be in good condition.
Bresnik, Ryazansky and Nespoli spent 139 days aboard the orbiting space laboratory. The trio who arrived at the station in July contributed to hundreds of scientific experiments aboard the ISS and performed several spacewalks.
They left Alexander Misurkin, commander of the crew, and two Americans, Joe Acaba and Mark Vande Hei, in charge.
Do you think astronauts on the ISS play a drinking game where they try to land toilet bombs on earth-bound targets? I would.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 16 2017, @10:29AM (1 child)
Looking down from the ecliptic, draw your orbit around the earth. Work out how fast you are travelling in that orbit. Fire a connonball in the reverse direction to your orbit, at your orbital speed. It is effectively stationary with respect to earth and, from the point of view of earth, will fall straight down. Not much of an orbit there, hey.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Sunday December 17 2017, @04:14AM
Certainly. However, very few cannons fire projectiles at ~8 km/s, which is orbital speed in low orbit.