Three up, two down

[GordonD]

I missed this yesterday, but the Soyuz MS-03 capsule landed safely to end the Expedition 51 mission aboard the ISS. It carried two cosmonauts - Russia's Oleg Novitsky and France's Thomas Pesquet. Their flight time was 196 days 17 hours 49 minutes.

 

Soyuz MS-03 was launched on 17 November last year, with a crew of three. The third astronaut, Peggy Whitson, will remain aboard the ISS until September, when she will return with the two men launched in April, Fyodor Yurchikhin and Jack Fischer, by which time she will hold all the US space records except one: the longest single mission will still be Scott Kelly's 340 days. However during the next day or so Whitson will break the record for the longest flight by a woman, currently held by Samantha Cristoforetti of Italy.