A trio of International Space Station (ISS) crewmembers arrived safely on Earth Thursday on what a NASA official called a "textbook homecoming."

According to BBC News, the Expedition 43 crew landed in Kazakhstan a month after they were originally intended to return. The flight was delayed when an unmanned Russian Progress capsule lost communications with ground control en route to the ISS and became unsalvageable upon reconnection.

Returning to Earth is Samantha Cristoforetti, an Italian astronaut who set the all-time record for longest ISS tour for a female. Accompanying her was Terry Virts, an ISS commander with NASA, and Anton Shkaplerov, a flight engineer.

The three crewmembers were aboard for the arrival of the historic "One-Year Crew," NASA noted in a press release. NASA astronaut Scott Kelly and Roscosmos cosmonaut Mikhail Kornienko are seven months into a tour aboard the space-based science lab that will last an entire year.

The study aims to examine the long-term effects of living in space. Kelly also proves to be an intriguing case, as his twin brother Mark is also a NASA astronaut.

While the unplanned delay in returning to Earth helped Cristoforetti secure her accomplishment, the other two crewmembers set milestones of their own. Virts' second ISS tour has now brought his time aboard the station to 212 days, while Shkaplerov's total is one day short of a full year.

The flight home takes about 45 minutes, but the entire process is significantly longer.

"You have a lot of G-forces pushing you down. You're watching parts of your spaceship burn up outside of your window. It's a little alarming visually," Doug Wheelock, an astronaut who has been aboard a Soyuz spacecraft, told ABC News. "And then, of course, the heat shield on the Soyuz is ablative. It melts off and chunks roll off as you're coming through the atmosphere so, consequently, [it] gets thinner and thinner."