A spacecraft that brought a crew of the International Space Station has not executed a "blind landing" due to malfunctioning sensors. This has been confirmed by the head of Russia's Federal Space Agency on Friday.

Vladimir Popovkin told journalists that it was not a blind landing. He added that it was nothing more than switching off an information display in the landing module of the Soyuz TMA-08M spacecraft. Russian cosmonaut Pavel Vinogradov landed aboard the Soyuz on Wednesday with three people. He said that most of the spacecraft's sensors went off during landing.

"We lost almost all readings we needed to control after the separation of the landing module. We basically had no readings at all", he said at a press conference. He said that the problem could have been a result of malfunction.

Vinogradov said that the crew was not even able to tell their altitude from the spacecraft's controls. Some emergency services gave them some information by radio.

Popovkin, however, said that everything that was switched off was an information display. He said that because of two dates being overlapped in a program, they had to turn off the display to avoid reading to be patchy on the screen.