A record-breaking crew is about to return from the space station. Their best photos show stunning landscapes, astronaut selfies, and SpaceX spaceships.

• Three crew members on current mission to the International Space Station, Expedition 61, are slated to return to Earth on Thursday.
• While living 250 miles above the Earth, they captured awe-inspiring images of ice-capped mountains in Kyrgyzstan, the nightscape in Iraq, and lagoons in Brazil. Here are their best photos.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

The 61st expedition to the International Space Station officially ends on Thursday, when three crew members are slated to return to Earth.

Since September, a group of four astronauts and two cosmonauts has been living on the space station, working together to conduct experiments and replace aging technology. They've grown cotton, repaired a cosmic-ray detector on the station's exterior, and tested remote robotics in space.

On the expedition were: European Space Agency (ESA) astronaut Luca Parmitano; NASA astronauts Christina Koch,  Andrew Morgan, and Jessica Meir; and Russian cosmonauts Aleksandr Skvortsov and Oleg Skripochka. Koch, Parmitano, and Skvortsov are the crew members scheduled to return to Earth, while the others will stay on the ISS for Expedition 62. 

"When you think about your home, you usually think about your house, your neighborhood, and your family. And when you look at this fragile blue ball from outer space, that's home too. It's everybody's home," Meir told a recent graduating class from her hometown of Caribou, Maine, according to Bangor Daily News.

Here are the most stunning photos from the crew's four months orbiting Earth.

The six-person crew of Expedition 61 didn't all arrive on the ISS at the same time. Koch, Morgan, and Parmitano were also part of Expedition 60, so they'd been orbiting Earth for months already.

NASA/Christina Koch

Then on September 25, a Soyuz MS-15 spacecraft carried Meir and Skripochka to the space station. With them came the first person from the United Arab Emirates ever to fly into space: Hazzaa Ali Almansoori.

"This is a huge responsibility for me, to be the first from our country and this program," Almansoori told the Houston Chronicle at the time. "For me, I started to look at the stars since childhood and for me, to reach here was impossible but it's not impossible now."

He stayed in space for eight days.

Then NASA astronaut Nick Hague, cosmonaut Alexey Ovchinin, and Almansoori landed back on Earth on October 3.

NASA

They landed near the remote town of Zhezkazgan in Kazakhstan.

For the nine days between the new crew members' arrival and the Expedition 60 departure, the ISS was a bit crowded.

ESA

It's usually staffed by three to six astronauts and cosmonauts, though the record for the most people on the ISS was set in 2009, when 13 astronauts and cosmonauts were on board.

See the rest of the story at Business Insider

See Also:

• Corporate giants like Google and Facebook bought a record amount of renewable power in 2019. These are the 10 energy companies that benefited most from those deals.
• 'Contagion' is now one of the most popular movies on iTunes because of the Wuhan coronavirus outbreak. Here's how it compares to reality.
• NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope is retiring after 16 years. Its incredible infrared images revealed nebulae and galaxies as we'd never seen before.

SEE ALSO: NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope is retiring after 16 years. Its incredible infrared images revealed nebulae and galaxies as we'd never seen before.

DON'T MISS: Astronauts on the space station see vibrant desert patterns, roiling storms, and volcanic eruptions. These are the best photos ever taken from the ISS.

from Feedburner https://ift.tt/2GZaPyc