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

Wrapping up a record-setting flight, Peggy Whitson, America’s most experienced astronaut with nearly two years of time in orbit across three missions, returned to Earth Saturday after a 288-day stay aboard the International Space Station, landing on the steppe of Kazakhstan with Soyuz MS-04 commander Fyodor Yurchikhin and flight engineer Jack Fischer.

A Russian cosmonaut, a NASA flight engineer and a Japanese physician-astronaut strapped into their Soyuz ferry ship early Sunday, undocked from the International Space Station and plunged back to Earth, landing on the steppe of Kazakhstan to close out a 168-day mission.

A day after a rare last-minute abort by its Soyuz launcher, a sharp-eyed civilian-operated Russian Earth observation satellite blasted off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome on Sunday on a five-year mission, giving Russia a fleet of three advanced digital imaging spacecraft in orbit.