A Soyuz space capsule carrying a three-man international crew has landed safely back on Earth.
Chris Hadfield of the Canadian Space Agency, Tom Marshburn of NASA and Roman Romanenko of the Russian space agency landed as planned in Kazakhstan at 3.31am Irish time.
They had completed a 146-day mission to the International Space Station.
The Soyuz TMA-07M capsule slowly descended by parachute on the sun-drenched steppes under clear skies.
Russian search and rescue helicopters hovered around the landing site for a quick recovery effort.
About three-and-a-half hours earlier, the three men departed the orbital outpost as it sailed 410km over eastern Mongolia.
"It's just been an extremely fulfilling and amazing experience," Cmdr Hadfield radioed to flight controllers yesterday.
The mission included an impromptu spacewalk on Saturday to fix an ammonia coolant leak that had cropped up two days earlier.
Without the repair, NASA likely would have had to cut back the station's science experiments to save power.
The cooling system dissipates heat from electronics on the station's solar-powered wing panels.
During the spacewalk, Dr Marshburn and Chris Cassidy, who remains aboard the station, replaced a suspect ammonia coolant pump, apparently resolving the leak.
Engineers will monitor the system for several weeks to make sure there are no additional problems.
Cmdr Hadfield made history yesterday when he released the first music video shot in space, turning the astronaut into an overnight music sensation with his zero-gravity version of David Bowie's hit Space Oddity.
The mission was the 35th expedition aboard the space station, a permanently staffed laboratory for biomedical, materials science, technology demonstrations and other research.
The men's replacements are due to launch from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on 28 May.
Until then, a skeleton crew commanded by Pavel Vinogradov and including NASA astronaut Cassidy and cosmonaut Alexander Misurkin will keep the station operating.
The crew's return to Earth comes on the 40th anniversary of the launch of the first US space station, Skylab.
Three crews lived and worked on the relatively short-lived Skylab between May 1973 and February 1974.
The project helped NASA prepare for in-flight research aboard the space shuttles and the International Space Station, which was constructed in orbit beginning in 1998.
The outpost, which is scheduled to remain in orbit until at least 2020, has been permanently staffed since November 2000.
