Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore returned to Earth on a SpaceX spaceship after their week-long flight turned into nine months on the space station.

A pod of dolphins swam up to the spot where the SpaceX Dragon capsule splashed down on Tuesday off Florida's coast. The capsule carried four astronauts, including NASA's Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams,

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.