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module, was heard to say: "It's good to be home."
• The three men were hoisted into recliners and posed for photos for a number of minutes before being carried into a tent for further checks.
• Writing on his NASA blog on the eve of his departure from the space station, Petit write: "I only hope that my small efforts here, perhaps adding one grain of sand to the beach of knowledge, will help enable a generation of people in the future to call space 'home.'"
• Petit and his colleagues were part of the team that handled the arrival to the space station last month of the privately owned SpaceX Dragon capsule. That became the first private delivery to the International Space Station.
• The retirement of the U.S. shuttle fleet has left Russia's venerable Soyuz spacecraft as the only means to deliver crews to the orbiting laboratory.
• Russians Gennady Padalka and Sergei Revin and U.S. astronaut Joseph Acaba

are expected to remain onboard the orbiting space station for a further three months.
• They will be joined later this month by NASA astronaut Suni Williams, Russia's Yury Malenchenko and Japanese astronaut Aki Hoshide, who are set to take off on a Soyuz spaceship from the Baikonur cosmodrome in southern Kazakhstan.
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