A Soyuz TMA-09M capsule brought three crew-members and the Sochi-2014 Winter Olympics torch back to Earth on Monday, after a four-day showcasing of the torch at the International Space Station.
The capsule landed in the Kazakh Steppe, slowed by parachutes and braking rockets, and all the space travelers were feeling well on landing, a mission control spokesman said, Itar-Tass reported.
Russian personnel pulled cosmonaut Fyodor Yurchikhin from the capsule, carried him to a folding chair, and handed him the torch from the Soyuz so that he could hold it aloft for the cameras, Reuters reported.
The torch had remained unlit throughout its space journey.
U.S. astronaut Karen Nyberg and Italian Luca Parmitano from the European Space Agency were lifted from the capsule before all three were taken to a heated tent. The temperature outside was minus 4 degrees Celsius.
The torch traveled to the International Space Station on Thursday, carried by cosmonaut Mikhail Tyurin, U.S. astronaut Richard Mastracchio and their Japanese colleague Koichi Wakata aboard another Soyuz ship.
Cosmonauts Oleg Kotov and Sergei Ryazansky took the torch on a spacewalk on Saturday, the first time an Olympic torch has been in open space. Torches were brought on space missions before the 1996 and 2000 Games.
Dmitry Chernyshenko, head of the Sochi 2014 organizing committee, has said that the torch taken to the International Space Station will be used to light the Olympic cauldron in Sochi on the opening day of the Games in February.
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