ESA astronaut Tim Peake being welcomed back by his family at Cologne’s airport in Germany on 19 June 2016.
The European Astronaut Centre in Cologne is the home base of all ESA astronauts. ESA’s medical team will monitor how he readapts to gravity.
Tim Peake, NASA astronaut Tim Kopra and commander Yuri Malenchenko landed in the steppe of Kazakhstan on Saturday, 18 June 2016 in their Soyuz TMA-19M spacecraft. The trio spent 186 days on the International Space Station.
The landing brings Tim Peake’s Principia mission to an end but the research continues. Tim is the eighth ESA astronaut to complete a long-duration mission in space. He is the third after Alexander Gerst and Andreas Mogensen to fly directly to ESA’s astronaut home base in Cologne, Germany, for medical checks and for researchers to collect more data on how Tim’s body and mind have adapted to living in space.
Follow Tim Peake via timpeake.esa.int