The mission was shorter than the usual six months after launch delays in order to ready a new spaceship to replace the initial Soyuz craft, which was cracked during pressure tests.

Moscow hopes Monday’s smooth landing will help to ease concerns over relying solely on Russia to service the ISS following a string of recent mishaps in its space programme.

“Everything is to cheer today,” Russian space agency chief Vladimir Popovkin told reporters at Mission Control in Moscow.

“Padalka, Revin and Acaba are feeling well, and they will all go home today.”

Three other International Space Station crew members - veteran Russian cosmonaut Yuri Malenchenko, NASA astronaut Sunita Williams and Japanese astronaut Akihiko Hoshide - remain in orbit.

They are scheduled to be joined by another trio - Kevin Ford, Oleg Novitsky and Yevgeny Tarelkin - due to blast off from the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan next month.

That mission was scheduled to launch on October 15 but will be delayed by about a week due to a technical glitch with equipment aboard the Soyuz, Popovkin said.

“We’ve had a worry over one of the devices. We decided to change it, test it again and so the launch has been put off by one week,” Popovkin said.

The Soviet Union put the first satellite and the first man in space, but Russia’s space programme has suffered a series of humiliating set-backs in recent months that industry veterans blame on a decade of crimped budgets and a brain drain.

While none of the mishaps have threatened crews, they have raised worries over Russia’s reliability, cost billions in satellite losses and dashed Moscow’s dreams to end a more than two-decade absence from deep-space exploration.