Yi Soo-yeon, South Korea's first female astronaut, is about to board the Soyuz TMA-12 spaceship at Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, April 8, 2008.

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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