International Space Station's Expedition 36 Crew Members Return Home

International Space Station's Expedition 36 crew members Pavel Vinogradov, Chris Cassidy and Alexander Misurkin safely touched down in Kazakhstan at 10:58 p.m. on Tuesday EDT after more than five months in orbit.

The trio undocked from the station in their Soyuz TMA-08M spacecraft three hours earlier, having formally handed over control of the orbiting lab the day before.

The days leading up to team's departure were filled with a variety of preparations. Cassidy, for example, collected blood and urine samples for stowage inside the Human Research Facility's science freezer while Vinogradov and Misurkin were responsible for readying the Soyuz for departure.

The trio, which first arrived at the station on March 28, leave behind Commander Fyodor Yurchikhin and Flight Engineers Karen Nyberg and Luca Parmitano, all of whom arrived at May 28 and are due home in November.

Awaiting their turn aboard the station are future crew members Oleg Kotov, Mike Hopkins and Sergey Ryazanskiy. The group is currently carrying out preparations in Kazakhstan in anticipation of their Spet. 25 launch.

The International Space Station is roughly the size of a football field and is equipped with two bathrooms and a gym. The spacelab celebrated its 10th anniversary of continuous human occupation in 2010 and has logged more than 1.5 statute miles, or eight trips around the Sun.

The next space station launch, meanwhile, is scheduled to take place on Sept. 17 when the private company Orbital Sciences is slotted to begin a demonstration mission of its cargo vehicle Cygnus. Currently, SpaceX is the only private company to have successfully completed a station resupply mission. Founded by Pay-Pal's Elon Musk, SpaceX is working to expand its capabilities to manned missions, ferrying astronauts to and from the station -- a goal it says can be reached within the next two to three years.