Astronaut Scott Kelly has landed safely on Earth after a year in space

Cmd. Scott Kelly says goodbye to fellow astronauts aboard International Space Station — (Image credit: AP/YouTube)

Astronaut Scott Kelly woke up on Tuesday, the last of his record 340 straight days in space, and took a picture.

At about 8 p.m. EST, Kelly and his roommate at the International Space Station for the past year, cosmonaut Mikhail Kornienko, said goodbye to their colleagues at the ISS and boarded a Soyuz capsule for their return trip to Earth. They landed in Kazakhstan at 11:26 p.m. EST, piloted by a second cosmonaut, Sergey Volkov, who had been at the ISS six months. Now Kelly and Kornienko will undergo a battery of tests to see how their bodies adapted to the long spell of weightlessness, radiation, isolation from other humans, and stress — a key step in determining if humans can fly to Mars. Kelly's results will be compared with ones from his identical twin brother, Mark Kelly, also an astronaut.

Kelly's 340 uninterrupted days in space shatters NASA's previous record by 125 days, but a Russian doctor still holds the record, 438 days. In all, Kelly has spent 520 days in space and Kornienko 516 days. You can watch them say their goodbyes and depart from the ISS in the video below. Peter Weber

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Peter has worked as a news and culture writer and editor at The Week since the site's launch in 2008. He covers politics, world affairs, religion and cultural currents. His journalism career began as a copy editor at a financial newswire and has included editorial positions at The New York Times Magazine, Facts on File, and Oregon State University.