Welcome back to Earth, Chris Hadfield!

At 10:31 p.m. EDT, the Soyuz capsule carrying Tom Marshburn, Roman Romanenko and Chris Hadfield landed on time, exactly on target in the landing zone in Kazakhstan, delivering the three men back home to Earth after nearly five months on the International Space Station.

The journey home took roughly three and a half hours, as the Soyuz capsule detached from the space station at just after 7 p.m. EDT, moved to a safe distance away, and then fired re-entry rockets to slow them down for entry into the Earth's atmosphere.

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As they plunged towards the ground for over three hours, ground control and the space station lost communication with the astronauts for some time, due to interference from the superheated gases surrounding the capsule, but everything went off without a hitch. The capsule's parachutes deployed on time, and it fired its soft-landing rockets exactly on schedule to set the craft down safely, exactly on target.

After being extracted from the capsule, from here, the three will spend some time being examined by a medical team, and then Marshburn and Hadfield will board a NASA jet to fly to Houston, Texas where they will be met by family members.

As for when Chris Hadfield will return to Canada, that will depend on his recovery, as he will need to spend some time getting used to our '1-g' environment after spending nearly five months in zero-g. When he finally does arrive back home, though, he's sure to receive a well-deserved hero's welcome.

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Welcome back, Chris Hadfield! It's great to have you back, even though we'll miss your daily messages from space!

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