ISS astronauts return to Earth despite US-Russian tensions

Two US astronauts and a Russian cosmonaut returned to Earth on Thursday to conclude a six-month mission to the International Space Station, while tensions between Washington and Moscow threaten a rare area of ​​cooperation.

NASA astronauts Drew Feustel and Ricky Arnold and Oleg Artemyev of Roscosmos landed in the steppes southeast of the Kazakh city of Dzhezkazgan at 1145 GMT.

The landing was held with Russian and US officials investigating the appearance of a mysterious hole in a Russian spacecraft moored at the orbital station.

Detected in August, the hole caused an air leak on the ISS but was quickly sealed.

This week, the head of the Russian Space Agency, Dmitry Rogozin, said that investigators thought the small hole had been made deliberately and that it was not a fault Manufacturing.

The official, who was subjected to US sanctions on the crisis in Ukraine in 2014, also lamented the "problems" of the Russian space agency's cooperation with NASA, which he attributed to an interference Anonymous American officials.

Last month, the Russian daily Kommersant announced that an investigation had revealed the possibility that US astronauts will deliberately drill the hole in order to send a sick colleague home, which the Russian authorities subsequently denied.

The ISS commander, Feustel, said his crew was "embarrassing" and NASA doubted Wednesday on the theory that the hole would be the result of sabotage.

The US space agency said that "eliminating defects" does not necessarily mean that the hole was created intentionally or with malicious intent ".

ISS astronauts plan an exit into space in November to gather more information on the hole.

The ISS is one of the few areas of close cooperation between Russia and the United States to have been spared until then by the deterioration of its relations, including after Washington's sanctions against Russia over the Ukraine and other crises.

Earlier, the ISS had held its emotional farewells as the returning trio, Alexander Gerst of the European Space Agency, Serena Auñón-Chancellor of NASA and Sergey Prokopyev of Roscosmos were waiting for the arrival of the next team of three people.

The next launch from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan is scheduled for next Thursday.

& # 39; Glory days in hot sun & # 39;

The crew was all smiles when they returned to Earth. Artemyev was the first to come out of the descent module and attend a fruit and vegetable feast featuring a giant cantaloupe melon in a sequence broadcast by Roscosmos.

He also wrote "spasibo" (thanks) and signed his name on the boat with chalk.

Feustel, 53, invoked Hollywood comic actor Jack Black's character, Nacho Libre, as he tweeted his farewells to life on the space station.

"I've had my glory days under the hot sun and now it's time to go home," he wrote late Wednesday in a tweet containing a picture of the sun's taken from the ISS .

While performing his third space mission, Artemyev, 47, and Arnold, 54, had previously served only one mission each.

Their trip, which began with a stopover in Baikonur in March, was particularly moving for Arnold, who, during his first mission in 2009, helped build the space station where he has lived for 197 days.

On board the ISS, Arnold, who has a background in teaching, gave space lessons as Sharon Christa McAuliffe, one of seven crew members killed in the plane. Space Shuttle Challenger accident in 1986, was supposed to teach at the origin.

In a video from NASA, Arnold revealed that the death of fellow educator McAuliffe in an explosion a little over a minute after the crew's takeoff of the challenger had been one of the reasons who had pushed him to start teaching.

"For me and for our country, it was very important that these lessons not be lost," he said.

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