NASA astronaut Peggy Whitson returns to Earth

NASA astronaut Peggy Whitson will return to Earth on Saturday after completing a 288-day mission to space, setting a record for the longest time in the United States.

Whitson, 57, was the first woman to command the International Space Station and is the astronaut with more space walks, among other records.

Biochemistry completes a mission on the Space Station that began in November 2016, which covered 196.7 million kilometers and carried out 4,623 orbits around Earth.

Whitson and his fellow crew members, NASA's Jack Fischer and Fyodor Yurchikhin of the Russian space agency Roscosmos, were due to land in Kazakhstan at 01:22 GMT on Sunday (22:22 p.m. in Brasília) aboard a Soyuz MS-04 spacecraft.

 Image Source:     https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/images/nasaLogo-570x450.png

After his return, Whitson will have accumulated 665 days in space throughout his career, more than any other astronaut in his country.

In his most recent mission, Whitson conducted experiments with human stem cells and blood samples and grew Chinese cabbage, as he showed on his Facebook page.