This image provided by NASA shows the Soyuz TMA-12 spacecraft approaching the International Space Station, carrying Russian Federal Space Agency cosmonauts Sergei Volkov, Oleg Kononenko, and South Korean spaceflight participant So-yeon Yi Thursday April 10, 2008. Volkov and Kononenko will spend six months on the station, while Yi will return to Earth April 19 with two of the Expedition 16 crewmembers currently on the complex. (AP Photo/NASA)
Official: Soyuz capsule misses its mark in Kazakhstan
MOSCOW (AP) — A Soyuz capsule carrying South Korea's first astronaut touched down in northern Kazakhstan on Saturday, 260 miles from its target landing site, a Russian space official said.
The Russian TMA-11 craft touched down around 4:30 a.m. EDT after a bone-rattling 3 1/2-hour descent from the international space station, 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 still unclear, he said. However, Russian space officials speaking in footage broadcast by NASA said Malenchenko had reported the crew was fine.
The capsule landed around 260 miles away from the scheduled landing site in the barren Kazakh steppes outside the town of Arkalyk — an unusual gap given how precise engineers plan for such landings, Lyndin said.
Searchers were en route to the site in helicopters and trucks, he said.
South Korea paid Russia $20 million for Yi's flight. She arrived at the station on April 10, along with cosmonauts Sergei Volkov and Oleg Kononenko who replaced Whitson and Malenchenko.
Whitson and Malenchenko spent roughly six months performing experiments and maintaining the orbiting station.
American astronaut Garrett Reisman, who arrived last month on the U.S. space shuttle Endeavour, is also on board the station.
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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.