Three astronauts on Thursday landed back on Earth after a troubled stint on the ISS which was marred by an air leak and the failure of a rocket set to bring new crew members.

According to the Russian space agency, the Soyuz spacecraft carrying Alexander Gerst of the European Space Agency, NASA’s Serena Aunon-Chancellor and Sergey Prokopyev of Roscosmos landed safely in Kazakhstan.

“There’s been a landing. The crew of the manned Soyuz MS-09 has returned safely to Earth after 197 days,” Roscosmos said on Twitter, adding that the spacecraft landed slightly ahead of scheduled time of 05:02 GMT.

“The crew feels well after returning to Earth,” the space agency added.

Live footage on the websites of NASA and Roscosmos did not show the landing of the astronauts’ capsule due to the thick fog over the snow-covered Kazakh steppe.

Rescuers pulled the crew members out of the capsule, with Prokopyev and Aunon-Chancellor appearing pale and weak due to the effects of long weightlessness while Gerst beamed broadly and offered an interview to German television.

When the astronauts took off off in June, they were one of the least experienced crews ever to join the International Space Station as only Gerst had been on a space mission before.

The first significant incident in the crew’s mission came in August when astronauts detected an air leak in their Soyuz spacecraft, which was docked to the orbiting space laboratory.

They sealed the small hole successfully but Russia launched an investigation and its space chief, Dmitry Rogozin suggested it could have been a deliberate sabotage carried out in space.

Their landing back on Earth was originally planned for December 13 but the schedule was put on hold after the October failure of a Soyuz rocket carrying the next crew thatb was supposed to join them.

Russia’s Aleksey Ovchinin and US astronaut, Nick Hague took off for the ISS on October 11 but their Soyuz rocket failed minutes after blast-off, forcing them to eject and make a harrowing emergency landing.

The first successful launch of astronauts since the October accident took place on December 3, carrying Kononenko, Anne McClain of NASA and David Saint-Jacques of the Canadian Space Agency.