Return to the Blue Dot

Smiling for the camera: Together with his colleagues Reid Wiseman and Maxim Surajew, Gerst flew back to earth in a Russian Soyuz craft. After three-and-a-half hours, they landed in the middle of the Kazakh steppe, at the Baikonur Cosmodrome. The mission started from the same space launch complex at the end of May this year.

The 166 days in Gerst spent in space have left their mark: Gerst's muscles have been weakened, and it will take some time for his sense of orientation to return. Helpers had to carry him away after the landing. "Thank you for your support, everybody," were Gerst's first words back on planet Earth.

Pizza, beer and the spring landscape are some of the things Alexander Gerst will be looking forward to experiencing. His terse summary of the time in space: "The hard work was really worth it." During the last press conference held while he was still at the ISS, he said he'd never really felt lonely - the crew was "like a family."

There was only a thin spacesuit between Gerst and the vacuum of space on October 7, when he did his first spacewalk. Gerst and his colleague were able to quickly modify a robotic arm, and had plenty of time to take stunning shots of Earth. A geophysicist, Gerst is familiar with natural phenomena such as this low-pressure system above the northern Atlantic Ocean.

We don't know a lot about how things we know on Earth behave in space. Alexander Gerst did his part to change that as part of the Blue Dot mission - he was tasked with conducting 100 experiments during his mission. This included work with a electromagnetic levitator, a furnace that can melt and solidify metals with a twist of a crank.

All astronauts have a daily sports routine - leg and gluteal muscles otherwise diminish quickly in weightlessness. These activities, combined with medical experiments, will help scientists on earth learn more about the human body.

During his stay on the ISS, Alexander Gerst had to regularly take his own blood samples, to both monitor his health, and study how weightlessness affects the human organism. These sample results were then sent to earth and examined by scientists in a lab. Gerst jokingly called his regular bleedings "my sacrifice for science."

Though there was much to do on the ISS, Alexander Gerst still found time to watch the World Cup final via satellite. He even brought the 2014 jersey to space and celebrated Germany's fourth victory. This picture was shown all over the globe after he uploaded it on Facebook and Twitter.

In taking photos of planet Earth from space, Gerst sought to emphasize the beauty and individuality of our planet - a small blue dot in space. The ISS crew placed emphasis on educational work, to try and raise awareness about the problems and threats facing our planet. Alexander Gerst communicated with the public on a near-daily basis via social media.

The German astronaut also found time for interviews with people from all over the planet. He fielded questions from schoolchildren, and posted many videos and pictures showing his work on the ISS. Gerst also maintained a blog sharing what experiments he was currently undertaking.