Astronauts return to Earth, but not as they know it
The long trip home from space for these returning astronauts has just got a little longer.
It's a very different Earth they've come back to, given the lockdown rules in place around the world.
After 205 days in space on the International Space Station, NASA astronauts Andrew Morgan and Jessica Meir and their Russian cosmonaut counterpart landed in the Kazakhstan desert on Friday (April 17) and now face a detour to ensure they get to their final destinations.
Travel restrictions throughout the country meant search and rescue teams could not set up base as usual and so the crew of the Soyuz MS-15 spacecraft will head to a Russian-owned spaceport, after being extracted from the capsule.
The journey isn’t done there either. The U.S. astronauts will then take a 186-mile drive to the city of Kzylorda, where they will board a NASA aircraft to finally take them home.
But, when they've completed 3,280 orbits of Earth and a total trip of 86.9 million miles, a little further to get home probably won’t bother them too much.
