ALMATY: Two Nasa astronauts and a Russian cosmonaut on Friday made a safe return from the International Space Station to find the planet transformed by the coronavirus pandemic.

Andrew Morgan, Jessica Meir and Oleg Skripochka touched down in central Kazakhstan in the first returning mission since the World Health Organisation declared Covid-19 a global pandemic in March.

Morgan had been on the ISS since July last year, while Meir and Skripochka arrived in September.

“TOUCHDOWN! Welcome home, Oleg Skripochka, Andrew Morgan and Jessica Meir!” Russia’s Roscosmos space agency wrote on Twitter.

Unusually, Nasa and Roscosmos did not show live footage of the trio parachuting down in their Soyuz landing capsule.

This was scrapped “due to technical limitations associated with the epidemiological situation,” Roscosmos said.

Subsequent footage from the landing site showed recovery crews wearing face masks and rubber gloves as they hauled the crew members out of the Soyuz MS-15 capsule, which was lying on its side.

“Please keep your distance,” one ground crew member could be heard telling another.

While the trio’s landing site southeast of the Kazakh town of Dzhezkazgan is the same as for previous crews, the pandemic has forced changes to mission-end protocol.

The crew will not be flying back home via Kazakhstan’s Karaganda airport as usual because it has been shut down, like so many other airports across the world.

Published in Dawn, April 18th, 2020