South Korea's first astronaut Yi So-Yeon smiles during a medical test after returning to Earth in a Russian space capsule in northern Kazakhstan. Yi returned to Earth, touching down with two International Space Station crew members slightly off target in ex-Soviet Kazakhstan.(Xinhua Photo)
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Ground crew help South Korea's first astronaut Yi So-yeon after landing in northern Kazakhstan Saturday April 19, 2008. The Soyuz capsule carrying South Korea's first astronaut landed in northern Kazakhstan Saturday, several hundred kilometers off-target, Russian space officials said. Mission Control spokesman Valery Lyndin said the condition of the crew South Korean bioengineer Yi So-yeon, American astronaut Peggy Whitson and Russian flight engineer Yuri Malenchenko was satisfactory, though the three had been subjected to severe G-forces during the re-entry. (Xinhua/AFP Photo)
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MOSCOW, April 19 (Xinhua) -- The Russian Soyuz spacecraft with South Korea's first female astronaut Yi So-yeon aboard landed safely in the Kazakh steppe on Saturday, according to the Mission Control Center.
The spacecraft carrying Yi, U.S. astronaut Peggy Whitson and Russian cosmonaut Yuri Malenchenko undocked with the International Space Station (ISS) and started trip home earlier Saturday.
The Soyuz capsule landed in the Kazakh steppe at 12:51 Moscow time (0851GMT), 20 minutes later than the planned time and 420 km from the planned landing site, the Misson Control said.
Rescue and search groups have evacuated the cosmonauts from the capsule. The cosmonauts are safe and sound, federal space agency head Anatoly Perminov told a press conference at the Mission Control.
Whitson and Malenchenko have worked in orbit for more than 191 days, while Yi, a 29-year-old biosystems engineer, arrived at the ISS on April 10 together with Sergei Volkov and Oleg Kononenko, the ISS Expedition 17 crew who will work in orbit till next autumn.
The capsule descended a ballistic descent path. It is an envisaged landing case, but the cosmonauts could feel high acceleration force, experts said.
Ballistic path returning is a rare case, which happened only twice in the ISS history - in 2003 and 2007.
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This morning, the Soyuz TMA-11 spacecraft landed in Kazakhstan, with three cosmonauts aboard. Russian Yuri Malenchenko, and American Peggy Whitson were returning from the International Space Station, where they had spent six months as the Expedition 16 crew. South Korean Yi So-yeon, the first South Korean to fly in space, was also aboard the spacecraft, having spent eleven days in orbit. Landing was scheduled for 08:30 UTC, however due to an anomaly during re-entry, it occurred at 08:51, 21 minutes behind schedule. Owing to a communication outage, it took some time to confirm that the spacecraft was on the ground.

A controlled ballistic descent profile was used, which differs from the planned re-entry profile in that it is steeper. The command to switch to this profile was given by the on-board computer during re-entry, after an unspecified anomaly was detected. RSC Energia, the manufacturer of the Soyuz spacecraft stated that this profile is considered a nominal backup, and that it was too early to speculate what caused it. Landing occurred 475 kilometres short, to the west of the scheduled landing site. The same backup profile was used during the landing of the previous Soyuz mission, Soyuz TMA-10, last October.

All three crewmembers were reported to be in satisfactory health. During re-entry, there was an unusually long loss-of-signal, which caused concern for flight controllers, as well as the Expedition 17 crew of the ISS.