Video: Soyuz MS-01 leaves the space station for landing

Three space station crew members packed up for a fiery return to Earth Thursday, wrapping up a nearly 200-day mission that was extended one month at the last minute because of a Russian rocket failure in April that threw a wrench into the lab’s crew rotation schedule.

Russia’s Progress MS-09 cargo craft made a 3-hour, 40-minute trip from a launch pad in Kazakhstan to the International Space Station on Monday, setting a record for the quickest journey to the orbiting research laboratory. Look back on the mission’s predawn launch from the Baikonur Cosmodrome and radar-guided docking at the space station with these images and videos.

NASA has announced that veteran astronauts Joe Acaba and Ricky Arnold will launch on nearly six-month expeditions aboard the International Space Station starting in September and in March 2018, filling seats aboard Russian Soyuz spaceships recently acquired in a commercial arrangement with Boeing.