The helicopters carrying rescue and medical personnel arrived at the capsule at 10:25 Moscow time (0625 GMT), where Nikolai Budarin and his US crewmates Kenneth Bowersox and Donald Pettit were waiting outside.

After a brief medical check-up, the rescue services airlifted the three crew members to the Russian cosmodrome of Baikonur, in the south of Kazakhstan.

Budarin, Bowersox and Pettit were all feeling fine, officials at Russian mission control outside Moscow said, the Interfax news agency reported.

The crew, who had blasted off from the International Space Station on the Soyuz TMA-1 earlier Sunday, were scheduled to have landed and been met at 6:07 am Moscow time (0207 GMT).

However, with the capsule landing some 440 kilometres (275 miles) away from the preset destination, it was more than two hours before rescue teams could locate the spacecraft and its crew, officials told AFP in the Kazakh capital.

The astronauts managed to make radio contact with the rescue teams and assure them that they were fine before communications broke off, but the radio signal was too weak for the search party to use it to pinpoint the vessel.

A rescue airplane finally obtained visual contact with the capsule at 8:21 Moscow time (0421 GMT), giving the search teams the precise location of the crew.

Meanwhile, the astronauts had managed to open the hatch and get out of the vessel an hour and a half after the landing, officials said, adding that two helicopters were dispatched to the site to retrieve the crew.

The three astronauts were later due to fly on to Moscow.

SPACE.WIRE