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Four astronauts ended their six-month stay on the International Space Station on Sunday and will land off the coast of Florida, days after Hurricane Adalia hit parts of the state.
The astronauts, members of the Crew-6 mission jointly operated by NASA and SpaceX, boarded the Crew Dragon capsule Sunday and left the space station at 7:05 a.m. ET. The crew is expected to spend one day aboard the 13-foot-wide craft as it maneuvers through Earth orbit toward its target landing site.
The Crew Dragon capsule is expected to land at 12:17 p.m. ET.
NASA said it was monitoring the impact of Hurricane Adalia, which hit Florida’s Gulf Coast early Wednesday. The hurricane hit northern Florida before sweeping across southern Georgia and the Carolinas.
Among the four astronauts who will descend are NASA astronauts Stephen Bowen and Warren “Woody” Hoburg, as well as Sultan Al Neyadi, the second astronaut from the United Arab Emirates to make the spacewalk, and Russian cosmonaut Andrei Vidyaev.
The group spent six months in the orbiting laboratory after being launched to the station in March. Over the past week, Crew-6 astronauts have worked to welcome and hand over operations to members of the Crew-7 team, who arrived at the space station on Sunday.
While in space, Crew-6 astronauts are tasked with supervising More than 200 scientific and technical projects.
“We have accomplished a lot during our mission,” Hoburgh said during a teleconference with the astronauts on Aug. 23. And we, as a crew, have made a total of three spacewalks.
During their stay, the Crew-6 astronauts also hosted the Axiom Mission 2 crew, a group composed of former NASA astronauts and three paying clients including an American businessman and two astronauts from Saudi Arabia. The flight is part of a plan to fly tourists and other paying customers to the International Space Station as NASA looks to increase commercial activity in low Earth orbit.
“It was a great adventure and lots of fun,” added Hoburgh.
The group also became acquainted with their partner Frank Rubio, a NASA astronaut who traveled to the space station last September aboard a Russian Soyuz spacecraft accompanied by two astronauts. Rubio has spent nearly 350 days aboard the space station and will soon break the record for the longest microgravity ever carried out by an American astronaut. NASA astronaut Mark Vande Hay set the current record of 355 days in 2022.
Rubio’s return trip is scheduled for spring. But the Russian Soyuz spacecraft, which carried him and two of his Russian colleagues to the space station, suffered a coolant leak late last year. Later, officials at the Russian space agency Roscosmos decided that the spacecraft was not safe enough to bring the cosmonauts home, so they sent a replacement vehicle and extended the ongoing mission by another six months.
“We’ve been here for six months,” said Hoburgh. “Frank thought when he flew into space he would be here for six months, and halfway through his mission he found out it was one year. His leadership here… is extraordinary.”
2023-09-03 22:15:47
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