NASA astronaut Frank Rubio is home after a year in space

Enlarge / NASA astronaut Frank Rubio smiles and waves moments after arriving back on Earth to wrap up more than a year in orbit. (credit: NASA/Bill Ingalls)

NASA astronaut Frank Rubio and two Russian crewmates parachuted to a landing on the remote steppe of Kazakhstan Wednesday, capping a 371-day mission at the International Space Station, the longest single spaceflight ever undertaken by an American.

It was also the third-longest mission off the planet in the history of human spaceflight, eclipsed only by two Russian cosmonauts who lived on the Mir space station in the 1990s.

Rubio, a US Army lieutenant colonel who grew up in El Salvador and Miami, was supposed to spend about six months in low-Earth orbit on the International Space Station. He launched September 21 of last year on a Russian Soyuz spacecraft with commander Sergey Prokopyev and flight engineer Dmitri Petelin.