The astronauts, Mike Fincke and Zena Cardman, Japan’s Kimiya Yui and cosmonaut Oleg Platonov, arrived on the ISS on 1 August expecting to complete a standard six and a half month stay. They were due to come home in mid-February.<\/p>\n
But last week, a scheduled spacewalk by Fincke and Cardman was called off at the last minute. Hours later, Nasa revealed a crew member had become ill. <\/p>\n
“It’s bittersweet,” said Mr Fincke when he handed over the keys to the ISS to Kud-Sverchjov on Monday. <\/p>\n
In a social media post, he stressed that all crew members on board were “stable, safe, and well cared for”.<\/p>\n
Orbiting Earth at an altitude of 250 miles, the International Space Station (ISS) makes 16 orbits of our planet a day, travelling at a speed of 17,500 miles per hour. <\/p>\n
It is run by five space agencies and carries out wide-ranging scientific research about space and the effects on humans, animals and plants of living in microgravity.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The astronauts, Mike Fincke and Zena Cardman, Japan’s Kimiya Yui and cosmonaut Oleg Platonov, arrived on the ISS…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":370234,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[90,416,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-370233","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-space","tag-science","tag-space","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/370233","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=370233"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/370233\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/370234"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=370233"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=370233"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=370233"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}