A four-member crew, including NASA astronauts Sunita "Suni" Williams and Barry "Butch" Wilmore, left the ISS early Tuesday on a SpaceX Dragon spacecraft.

NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams have returned to Earth after being stuck in space for more than nine months.

Their return caps a protracted space mission that was fraught with uncertainty and technical troubles and turned a rare instance of NASA's contingency planning - and the latest failures of Boeing's Starliner - into a global spectacle.