ASTANA: A Soyuz MS-03 spacecraft carrying French astronaut Thomas Pesquet and Russian cosmonaut Oleg Novitskiy landed on the Kazakh steppe Friday, ending their marathon 196-day mission to the International Space Station.

The pair undocked as the International Space Station (ISS) orbited above the Chinese-Mongolian border, marking the beginning of a 400-kilometre descent back to Earth lasting just over three hours.

First-time flyer Pesquet’s long-duration trip fell just shy of the record space mission for a European Space Agency astronaut set by Samantha Cristoforetti of Italy back in 2015. Former Russia Air Force pilot Oleg Novitskiy, 45, was completing his second mission to the ISS.

Pesquet and Novitskiy arrived at the station on Nov 20 for a six-month mission with American Peggy Whitson, who holds the NASA record for cumulative time spent in space.

Pesquet won plaudits at home and abroad as well as over half a million followers on Twitter over the course of his preparations and time in space.

Pesquet himself underlined the “fragility” of Earth in an interview to AFP from the ISS. “There are things that one understands intellectually, but which one doesn’t really get,” he said via video link, gently floating around in the zero gravity of space. When it comes to global warming, “we talk of two degrees [Celsius] or four degrees — these are numbers which sometimes exceed human understanding. “But to see the planet as a whole ... to see it for yourself ... this allows you to truly appreciate the fragility.”

The record for the longest continuous mission in space by a European Space Agency astronaut is still held by Cristoforetti, who was in orbit for 199 days from November 2014 to June 2015 and also broke the record for the longest single mission for a woman.

Published in Dawn, June 3rd, 2017