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Astronauts belonging to Russia, Japan and United States have returned successfully and safely after completing an unusual nighttime landing on Earth in Kazakhstan after making a flight back from International Space Station. "They have landed safely and the recovery team have found them. Everything is according to plan," said a spokesman for Russian Space Agency Roscosmos to AFP, reports Yahoo News. Kjell Lindgren from NASA, Japanese Kimiya Yui and Russian Oleg Kononenko came down from their Soyuz capsule at 7:18 PM, local time in the darkness. "What an amazing experience," Lindgren said while being monitored on the snow-capped steppe in a televised footage.

The group of 3 left for ISS from Russia's Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan in July this year and spent a total of 141 days in space. Their landing in the night was the first since November 2012, making the recovery operation slighltly more difficult. "Of course, this makes things more complicated but our recovery teams are trained to work day and night in all kinds of weather conditions, so this is not a problem," Mission Control spokesman Sergei Talalasov told AFP, as reported by NDTV.

NASA said that this was the first time that their crew landed to earth in the dark and sixth time that the Soyuz capsule came from the space station in the night. With the astronauts landing safely, they marked an end to Expedition 45 to the ISS. Scott Kelly from NASA, the commander of ISS, who stayed behind on the space station with Sergei Volkov from Russia tweeted, 'They arrived in space like baby birds barely able to fly and now they soar home as eagles. Great job Kjell and Kimiya!'. The ISS Space laboratory has been orbiting the Earth at approximately 17,000mph from 1998, says Daily Mail