Russian astronauts Alexey Ovchinin and Ivan Wagner have returned to Earth along with American Donald Pettit after a seven-month science mission on board the International Space Station (ISS).

The Russian Soyuz MS-26 spacecraft carrying the trio touched down southeast of the town of Dzhezkazgan, Kazakhstan, today morning.  The landing was confirmed by the United States’s NASA and Russia’s Roscosmos space agency.

NASA said the crew was moved to a recovery staging area in the city of Karaganda, adding that Pettit was doing well.

NASA said in a statement that the crew arrived on the orbiting ISS laboratory on September 11, 2024, spending 220 days in space during which they orbited the Earth 3,520 times, completing a journey of 150.15 million km.

Space exploration has remained a rare avenue of cooperation between the US and Russia since the Russia-Ukraine war.

Earlier this month, the Soyuz MS-27 spacecraft carried another US-Russia crew – NASA’s Jonathan Kim and Russian crewmates Sergei Ryzhikov and Alexei Zubritsky – to carry out scientific experiments on the ISS.