U.S. astronaut Christina Koch, who led the first all-female spacewalk in 2019, landed in Kazakhstan on Thursday after a record stay on the International Space Station, ending a 328-day mission expected to yield new insights into deep-space travel.

The Soyuz MS-13 capsule touched down on the Kazakh desert steppe at 4:12 am ET carrying Koch, 41, European astronaut Luca Parmitano and Russian cosmonaut Alexander Skvortsov.

Koch’s mission broke the record for the longest continuous stay in space by a woman, previously held by NASA’s Peggy Whitson.

She also achieved a gender milestone in a relatively routine spacewalk with fellow NASA astronaut Jessica Meir last October that marked the first time two women stepped out of the space station at the same time.

NASA’s first attempt for an all-female spacewalk in March 2019 was called off because one of the astronauts’ medium-sized spacesuits was not properly configured in advance, igniting a gender-equity debate within the space community.

Astronauts on the space station, whose 20th anniversary in low-Earth orbit comes later this year, have tallied 227 maintenance spacewalks, nearly two dozen of which included women astronauts, according to NASA. Koch and Meir conducted two more spacewalks together in January.

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