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Four astronauts in a SpaceX-built capsule swooped through the Florida night sky like a meteor before leaping into the Gulf of Mexico on Monday night. The water landing closed a mobile six-month stay on the International Space Station.
The space travelers were part of a mission called Crew-2: NASA’s Shane Kimbrough and Megan McArthur; Akihiko Hoshide of Japan’s space agency JAXA; and Thomas Pesquet of the European Space Agency.
“It’s great to be back on planet Earth,” said Mr. Kimbrough, the commander of Crew-2, to SpaceX mission control after the capsule, and the four large parachutes flew into the backwaters near Pensacola, Fla. He and his fellow astronauts left the space station at 2:05 ET on Monday afternoon and returned to Earth at 22:33.
Two parachutes opened as planned to curb the pod’s speed, then four took their place and one remained squashed for about a minute before inflating. Eventually all the channels opened and Crew Dragon plunged into calm waters.
“The comeback looked flawless,” Kathy Lueders, NASA’s chief of space operations, told the agency’s live broadcast. He added that engineering teams will examine the “delayed” shot that doesn’t open immediately, adding that this is “behavior we’ve seen multiple times in other tests.”
Nicknamed Endeavor, the capsule swayed in the ocean as rescuers circled around and hoisted it onto a rescue ship. About an hour after the spacecraft landed, crews helped the smiling astronauts out of the capsule and onto stretchers, one by one, as they were getting used to Earth’s gravity again.
The voyage was the fourth safe return to Earth for Crew Dragon, a gumdrop-shaped astronaut capsule developed by SpaceX to replace the space shuttle, with nearly $3 billion in funding from NASA. The spacecraft is expected to save the agency money, as NASA no longer needs to purchase expensive seats for its astronauts on Russia’s Soyuz rockets.
The journey was not without difficulties. Last week, NASA ordered the crew not to use the capsule’s toilet during their stay on board. Engineers on the ground first spotted a leaking toilet tube in another SpaceX capsule in September. The malfunction was limited to a compartment at the base of the spacecraft and did not affect the cabin.
However, NASA has declared that the Crew Dragon toilet on the space station is prohibited until it is repaired. This meant that the crew had to either hold it or use astronaut-grade diapers embedded in their flight suits as an emergency.
Crew-2 mission pilot Dr. “Of course that’s insufficient, but we’re ready to manage that once we’re on our way home at Dragon,” McArthur said at a press conference Friday.
The crew overcame many other challenges and responsibilities during their time in orbit.
Shortly after Crew-2’s launch in April, SpaceX mission control warned them that a piece of space debris was projected by the capsule to fly. Astronauts were instructed to “immediately” return to their flight suits and lower their helmet visors.
Nothing came close to the capsule, and the crew arrived safely at the space station on April 24.
Days later, the US Space Command, which monitors objects in orbit, determined that the warning was the result of a “reporting error” and that “there was never a threat of collision as there were no objects at risk of collision with the capsule.” Still, the incident renewed debate about the growing threat of space debris and other clutter in low Earth orbit.
In July, Russia launched a new science module that will be added to the Russian segment of the space station. Immediately after being placed, the module named Nauka, accidentally fired a set of thrusters He spun the football field-sized lab one-and-a-half revolutions for about 15 minutes before coming to a stop up and down.
The accident prompted mission control teams in Houston and Moscow to scramble to return the station to its normal location. The Crew-2 astronauts returned to their Crew Dragon capsules in case they needed to escape.
“We were prepared to land if necessary, in case something really bad happened,” Mr Kimbrough said at a news conference on Friday. “Of course it wasn’t, thank goodness.”
a similar event took place in October Although it looked less violent than the first, it contained another Russian spacecraft docked with the space station.
While the crew-2 and other space station residents faced dangers in orbit, they were also preoccupied with typical research and maintenance tasks.
A component of his work even included some games: a night of tacos flavored with freshly harvested chiles. The peppers were leftovers from a study examining crop cultivation in space. Combining chiles with fajita steak, rehydrated tomatoes, and artichokes, Dr. McArthur described them as “the best space tacos ever.”
During their six-month stay in the orbital lab, the astronauts worked on hundreds of other scientific studies. ultrasonic tweezersusing sound to explore, move small objects real-time protein crystal growth It’s under the microscope as part of a study of new drugs that can cure disease.
Crew-2 astronauts also witnessed the making of a feature film sponsored by Russia’s space agency Roscosmos. Russian actress and director launched to the space station On October 5, for a 12-day shoot at the station for their movie “The Challenge.” The movie is about the mission to rescue a sick astronaut played by Oleg Novitsky, a real Russian astronaut on the station.
When the Crew-2 astronauts left on Monday, only a single crew of three astronauts remained on the space station. That’s a small number of people for the orbital lab, which has 13 astronauts on board at once, but usually seven crew members these days. The last time the space station held just three astronauts was in April 2020.
Mark Vande Hei, a NASA astronaut, and two Russian astronauts, Anton Shkaplerov and Pyotr Dubrov, will hold the fort for at least four days until four more astronauts from NASA and SpaceX’s Crew-3 mission arrive in the East at 7:10pm on Thursday. time. Their arrival was delayed by weather conditions, as well as what NASA described as an astronaut’s “minor medical issue” that it said had nothing to do with Covid-19.
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